He is not a quiet creature anymore.
The smoke gives him away, as do the fires he sets in his wake. He is no better at controlling them than he was in the beginning, when the flames ate him alive and left behind the hellish monster he deserved to be, but he has never been very adept at self-control. Today, he is wandering the edges of her city, feeling the inevitable curl of a hunger he cannot satiate knotting in his gut. The beast is always hungry, but today it salivates for her.
Straia.
Straia.
Straia.
He hears her name sung through the vessels in his bloodstream, and the melody is sweet. He feels the creature in his belly gnawing on his xylophone ribs, and he ignores the hundreds of the living that he passes because he only wants the one.
Straia.
He sets the trees on fire. He sets the earth and the brush alight. The flames burn white-hot, and she is sure to smother them into ash but the task itself is sure to bring her forward – and when at last he finds her, beautiful and awful, the subtle curl of a smile will find his wicked lips.
“Liar,” he will sing then between his teeth, and he is close, too close – so close that she’ll feel the heat of his breath in her ear. He doesn’t know why he’s angry, but only that he is. He doesn’t know why the syllables he breathes are venomous, only that they are. He doesn’t know why he hears the thrum of her pulse above the static in the air, but he does. It makes his skin roll and prickle as a shudder runs underneath his flesh and through his bones.
He doesn’t know why he’s angry, but she will.
She’ll know that he found Etro under the shadow-wings of a raven flying overhead, just as she said he would. She’ll know that it wasn’t the same. She’ll k now that it was wrought with something he could not recognize, something he cannot recognize still.
That the girl was not what he left behind.
Straia will know that Etro was not the plain-faced child with stars in her eyes. That she was not the lanky youth he left behind in clouds of billowing smoke, that she did not harbor the same set of hips that he watched disintegrate into the distance once. She will know that once he saw something inside of her that made him quiet. She will know that once Etro did not hold a pitchfork in her hand. She will know that once she did not fear him. Once, she did not wonder if he would slit her throat and bleed her into the earth.
And then she ran.
And then he left.
And it was different.
And she might have loved him.
And he might have killed her.
And Straia will know.
Straia will know that Etro smelled like someone else.
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.
i am sorry this reply is like 4 months overdue