etro --
in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon,
I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom
Etro is not blind. Etro knows exactly what he is. What he does.
She knows that when she leans in, she is only pressing the knife into her belly. She knows that when she skims her mouth over the dangerous edges of his knife that poison is coating her lips. She knows that she dances with darkness whenever she is with him, that she is inviting into her life, trapping it in her breast.
But she doesn’t care.
She has never cared.
Her breath is trapped in her throat, the wings of her pulse fluttering on the edges, and she is trapped in the steel of his shark eyes as certainly as if she was the mangled bones at his feet. She doesn’t move as he begins to make his way toward her, as he cuts his path through the snow, the edges of it melting and folding away. She just watches him, wondering at how time has not seemed to touch him, at how he looks as if he had simply stepped away and out from her own memories, as certain and unchanging as heaven.
Rather, perhaps, as certain and unchanging as hell.
But she does not have forever to spend suspended in her own disbelief, her own joy, because his presence pierces her own bubble and he is near her, as silent and sullen and normal as she remembers.
And she forgets herself.
She closes the distance between them, a soft cry escaping her mouth—the sound lyrical and lifting. She presses into the ash of him, unafraid of how he might retaliate, only able to remember how she had once embraced the Gift Giver in the same way when his gifts had blinded her to reality.
But this is not a trick. This is not a lie.
This is him, and it is her, and she can taste the charcoal of him on her tongue.
He may dream of ending her, she knows, and she doesn’t bother to hide her throat. She just leans up, running her ruddy lips against the angle of his jaw, breathing in the familiar scent of sulphur and the coppery scent that she chooses to ignore. Just as she ignored that which laid at his feet.
It doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter.
Nothing matters but the closeness of him, and she breathes out a sigh. “Kingslay,” his name a prayer on her lips, a prayer that has lived for years on the tip of her tongue and is finally realized.
“Kingslay.”
-- vanquish and yael's trait-negating desert princess --
