stones taught me to fly; kingslay + any

[etro]

and I ran back to that hollow again the moon was just a sliver back then and I ached for my heart like some tin man when it came, oh, it beat and it boiled and it rang She does not know where she has been. She does not know anything except it was cold (so much colder than that smothering heat of the Desert that both stifled and warmed her very bones). She does not know anything except she had run into her legs could not carry her any longer, until exhaustion claimed her; she had run until she had two options: to sleep or to die. She had run until she could not choose the latter. The sickness had started slowly, and she had dreaded it even as she felt it stealing through her veins and racing up her throat like arsenic. She had fought it (oh, how she had fought it!), but eventually she could not deny it. Not when waking up was like shrugging off a thousand pound coat; not when opening her eyes had flooded her senses with agony. She was stubborn, but even she wavered. How does one accept the fact that one’s body cannot love home like one’s mind? How does one accept the fact that there was something broken? Something she did not fully understand or comprehend or remotely grasp. So she had run with a fear as deep and instinctual as time itself. She had fled her foreboding father and powerful mother and him. She did not know which hurt more. But eventually the sickness had ebbed and health had flooded her rather plain body until she woke brightly and found herself thinking more about the pangs of loneliness than the twists of her gut. And, like the moth returns to the flame, she had turned her homely nose back toward Beqanna where it had all begun. Where she had once been a precocious youth who asked dangerous questions. She expects a chill to run through her when she steps into the meadow. She expects there to be some sort of emotion, but the only thing she can articulate is the feeling of anticipation and the sharp-edged sting of desire thrumming through her breast. It is then that she realizes that the meadow never had any power over her; it was him. Her almond eyes flicker from body to body as she watches them, and she waits for the hardened eyes.  The eyes of a killer. The eyes of her Kingslay. E T R O vanquish and yael’s trait negating desert princess