the rain that falls upon your skin
it's closer than my hands have been
His words are meant as strikes, and they do not miss their mark. Unable to look him in the face, Lepis does not see the shift of his eyes from warm hazel to two hard jewel, one sapphire and the other emerald.
If she had seen them, would she have recognized them as the eyes in the stories he had told her on dark nights? Lepis tries not to think of those stories, in much the same way she is sure that Wolfbane tries not to think of the ones that she has told him. They had hurt enough in the happening – and the sharing of them had been no less painful. Lepis hadn’t been able to look him in the eye when she told him the first one (the first of so many). After though while she was still waiting for him to recoil in disgust, he’d reached down and drawn her face up, and kissed each trail of tears with the utmost delicacy. She’d learned then that his eyes were the exact shade of a half-dried eucalyptus leaf, the green of them circling a center with a shade like a twilight redstone cliff still warm from the summer sun. She’d learned then what it meant to be seen by someone who truly accepted her, flaws and all.
That is not what she sees when she finally looks up.
There really is a stranger behind those eyes. And she is too curled in on herself to think rationally, to wonder at this inexplicable change in the man she loved. Later, she will wonder, will doubt, but not now. Now, she forces that aside, replaces it with an anger that keeps the pain at bay. Anger and scorn so thick in Lepis and her voice that they might as well be projected from her thundercloud eyes.
“They are all coming,” she tells him, “All of them that you haven’t driven away or gotten killed.” He had shown her Gale’s broken body? She will use the reminder of how he’d failed to save him. Her voice had bennt on the last word, but does not break. She does not believe what she says, but just as when they had argued before, it feels good to say it. This time though, she won’t need to feel guilty over it later. She won’t need to lament that pain she’d caused her husband, and by default the way she’d hurt herself. No, this time she will regret what she tells him. He deserves it, this time.
Whoever this is, whomever her husband has become, he deserves this for doing this to her.
Lepis ignores that Celina is old enough to decide where she goes, and that Marni and Pteron certainly are. Castile had even told her to appoint Pteron leader here, but Lepis will not leave him behind. Not this time. She’d left him behind once more, fleeing as quickly as they could from a nightmare. Later, when she wonders and doubts, she will remember that more clearly. Now though, she wants only to put distance between her family and this thing in front of her. It speaks of Castile, and she sneers.
“He’ll come here.” Lepis snaps, her voice as sharp as the expression on her face. “I don’t want you putting a single hoof in Loess in ever again.”
lepis, comtesse of taiga
queen of loess | queen of sylva | queen of the south
lover of wolfbane | comtesse of taiga
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@[Wolfbane]
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