oh, this my weapon, this my loam. this my blood, this my bone.
She is like talking to the stars—to the very galaxies, as milky as their light and intangible as it too. It filters through him, frustrating and fascinating him in equal measure. He is a thing of forest and wolf and fang. He is made for this world, born of its dirt and carved from its bone. But not her. It’s clear in the color that shimmers beneath the weak sunlight and the way her voice floats between them.
He is acutely aware of his wild nature, the broad strokes of him.
For the first time, he wishes he had the delicacy to be fragile.
But in the same breath he knows it is an impossible thing.
“What happened to it?” he asks, struggling to keep the curiosity from his voice, that naked desire to know more about her and where she came from—that weakness in his hunger for more. His reaction to her crossing the threshold of his privacy dies in his throat as his gaze sharpens on her, as he studies her more intently, wondering at this other place she came from, this place that birthed someone such as she.
She asks of his own home and he makes a sound in his throat. Part dismissal, part annoyance. “Tephra,” because it is the only home he has ever known, even though his parents only claimed it as a home just before his birth. “It is not far from here.” It is a land of volcano and ash and he doesn’t despite it even though it doesn’t claim him. One day he will leave the safety of the pack. He will not be bound there.
“What was it like being there?”
He tries to cloak his curiosity behind indifference but it is unveiled all the same.
@[irisa]