A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.
At first she had been writhing.
At first the agony of her own gently prodded ego had made it all but impossible to stay away, to keep from provoking them. She, begrudgingly, sent the magician away from her (to keep them from guessing, to blind them from what would come next) and from the safe shroud of the shadows collected the allies she knew would help her cause see fruition.
At night, and with the staccato hum of adrenaline flooding every inch of her fat and muscle, bleeding out into it like oil into the ocean, she would watch the moon hanging in the sky, white and wild as the wasteland; her begrudging home. She would invent in her mind new and wonderful ways to ruin him without ever touching him, because how dare he rob her of her intended victory, because how dare he not fall for her lies and her face and her hips and her talent.
But slowly, those nights became days, became weeks, and then months, and with each passing moment her frantic urency turned bitter hatred became, once again, something else entirely — complacency. Focusing on survival and shielding the wind from her skin she forgot her tactical maneuvers and growing resistance. Of course a leopard cannot change it’s spots, and she would without doubt make a grab to steal any carelessly placed bone that she could manage to fit her teeth around, but her drive to wrangle one had all but been assuaged.
Strangely enough, Set had been crucial in this progression. His arrival meant her survival depended less on the taking of this frozen spit of land, and as luck would have it for the Nerinians, focused her attentions elsewhere. The thought of their tangled magic still sends quivers creeping down the mountains of her vertebrae, and a slow curling smile finds its home across her lips as she walks now across the tundra having grown achingly bored in a thick copse of coniferous trees.
She will go where he goes, she thinks; a pilot fish wavering dutifully beneath the belly of a great white.
That’s when she sees him, and just as he sounds out for her. She takes a moment to let her eyes devour the flesh she finds between the congruent lines of his large body; the thick neck and broad shoulders lead her to the realization that were their political platforms less glaringly different she would not have found him nearly so offensive on first meet. The slow curl of a smile lifts the corners of her mouth, and her eyes seem to lengthen a moment in her own measured delight at what is to follow next. A joke, he will gather, from the playful cadence that weaves through the words:
“Leilan,” she says, remembering fondly the way it had fallen off Set’s tongue during their last true encounter right before the false battle.
“Have you missed me?”
phasus
@[Leilan] V excited
