etro --
in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon,
I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom
Etro has no expectations.
Not with him.
She never has.
She’s always known exactly what he was. She loved him for it. Loves. She knows the disease that seeps underneath his veins, dragging his eyes from her and a future to the immediate satisfaction of snapping bones. She knows that he has tasted blood the way that she tastes water. That he has drunk from the fountain of life and been unquenched, always hungering and thirsting for a destruction beyond her scope of understanding. She knows that he is the reaper and one day he will come for her.
She knows.
She knows.
So she doesn’t flinch when the sky above them begins to to grow dark, the clouds snapping with his own anger—bare in its simplicity, raw in its primal nature. She tilts her head up slightly to consider the way that the wind whips around them. She feels the negation within her stirring and she inhales it deep, taking it into her belly and trapping it for a moment. Let him have this. Let him have this moment.
The mud crawls up her muddy colored legs and she welcomes it. Her blood begins to simmer, and she allows it. Once, when she was a star-eyed girl, she would have been frightened by this. But not now. She is not the same girl she was when they had first met and although her hips still slope awkwardly and her proportions still don’t quite line up she is stronger, more certain, more confident in it.
At his question, she just looks at him, calm in spite of the way he presses the knife to her throat, the way that it nicks the flesh, the blood that wells. Is this love? he asks and she just smiles, the expression almost dreamy. She inhales at the feel of his teeth against her, the ash he leaves behind, the slight burning of hair and flesh. “It could be,” she answers breathlessly. “For us it could be.”
Is this what you’ve always wanted?
She laughs, silver bells in the middle of the summer storm.
“I told you - you’re all I’ve ever wanted.”
But then the power in her ripples and she laughs again, the sound taking on more of an edge.
“Enough.” The word is powerful in its own right and she releases her gift, letting it balloon within her, reaching out to smother the fire in him. Her eyes are brighter than they’ve ever been when she looks at him but she doesn’t say anything else, just lets the fires smolder in their wake.
-- vanquish and yael's trait-negating desert princess --
@[Kingslay]