Burn baby burn! - any

[Rhonen]

rhonen

molten eyes and a smile made for war

Eventually, he knows he will choose a home. Probably he will go to the place the mare in the Field had offered – it sounded fine, and enough different from the Falls and the Deserts that he wouldn’t regret his choice ever day – but for the moment he has returned to the Forest. Not the Meadow – he avoids the Meadow now like a plague – but to the dark comfort of the Forest, where his nightmares don’t seem so far out of place.

He has other worries than where he will call home.

Even though the fairies had stripped them of their magical powers, the strange powers he had found himself with were not the end of his responsibilities. Before, every day, he had felt the weight of the seal in his very being, heavy, a reassurance that Conquest was secured away from the world. Unable to touch the ones he loved. But he doesn’t feel that now, and he wonders – is the seal still there, but he can’t feel it without his magic? Or has Conquest been released on the world? So he stands, tucked into the shadows, and watches for signs that his worst nightmares have come to pass again.

When his eyes flicker over the black-hued girl, something makes him pause, look again. Surging forward, he bumps into her (harder than he meant to) as an excuse to get a closer look. A feel. Something, anything? Rocking back on his hind end he shakes his head, tries to look sheepish (fails, because his dark eyes still catalogue every inch of her, intensely interested). “Sorry,” he snaps, and it’s every so clear that there isn’t an ounce of truth to the apology of the word. “Wasn’t looking where I was going.”

She’s not It. On closer inspection, she’s not like the terrors of his past at all. And he doesn’t start to develop boils and burns from the contact, which had been Conquest’s M.O. Rhonen supposes it was the unsettling eyes that made him nervous, as he looks into hers, uncertain of what to do now.