It is unusual for him to be here.
He risks it all by coming here today; exposure and his own self-proclaimed omnipotence (a facade, a fallacy at best) unravelling in a sea of blood and groans should the contagion take hold of him. Today, however, he feels like gambling; testing theories he ought to leave well enough alone. There is something about the danger in it that attracts him (like a manic, seeking out another high before the fall). Or, perhaps, he is more simply pouting — reeling from the cold and quiet assaults of one small mare who shouldn’t affect him in the ways that she seems to. One small mare who somehow has become an ideogram for all of the rejection and adversity that life had thrown him that then, over the years, putrefied and festered like rot under his skin and left him gangrenous.
The latter seems more likely.
The meadow is still quiet, and sleepy. There are no songs spilling out of the heavy boughs of oak and maple trees yet, and while a gentle breeze combs through the long-grass and thistles like waves of an ocean its beauty is lost on Elektrum, who breaks the stalks of wildflowers as he trundles carelessly through beds of the wild things. Even as the fragile morning light drapes across him like a veil, and refracts off the silvery strands of his mane and forelock as they play in the wind he does not stop to wonder about the magic of these quiet moments.
He is a god, isn’t he?
He’s seen a thousand sunrises more extravagant than this one. There are worlds that exist with so many different scales and types of them, some with a brilliant kaleidoscope of colours, others still with multiple suns. It can’t be his fault that earth became so much uglier when you saw so much more. And so here he waits, a festering sore amidst the striking scenery, until the distinct crackle of atoms splitting echoes in the silence and then on the breeze comes the smell of sweat on her skin tangled with something he knows and appreciates better than wildflowers and sunrises; time.
As soon as the sigh escapes her lips he is beside her, in his wake a desperate mess of broken stalks and weeping flowers, bolder with every breath he takes.
“I see you,” he says, intentionally vague. These are the kinds of things he loves. Let her interpret what he is seeing, be it the bend of her hips, her unusual character flaws (the eyes, he notes with a pang of disgust), or the way she dabbles with time like they are old friends. Let her wonder what he knows that she thinks is secret. Let her think him as powerful and eternal as the tides, or magnificent, like the mantarays who hunt bioluminescent krill in the night through waters so lightless and without end that it looks as though they’re flying through the cosmos swallowing stars, unconstrained by the trivial and mortal matters of gravity or physics.
Because, in a way he is.
It’s a shame that she is not meant for safekeeping, or one small, greedy individual.
It’s a shame that she has fled one danger to find herself before another.
@[Giohde]