bitterness is thick like blood and cold as a wind sea breeze
if you must drink of me, take of me what you please
She is quiet and there is no small part of him that wants to dip his fingers into her mind and see exactly what she is thinking—to pull apart the threads and play out the thoughts for himself. He wonders at what would occupy her as she steps in quietly beside him, watching the rest of the island, and he fights against the strange new feeling of jealousy—that need to know if her thoughts went to the other men in her life.
But he doesn’t invade her privacy, not now. Instead, he erects his own wall around her mind, enclosing it and leaving the space between them open and free, as if magic did not exist in the world at all.
“You keep saying that,” he angles his head toward her, eyes sparking with humor at her insistence of his own impossibility. “But you have no idea just how impossible I am.” She doesn’t know the root of his magic or the way it branches out through him like a tree—the way he is connected to this life and the other. She doesn’t know the strange turn of events that has brought him here, that keeps him here.
These are stories for other times though, other moments, and he doesn’t dredge them up.
He just reaches across to tug at her mane ever so slightly, feeling the give of it between his teeth and feeling the barest hints of flame licking up his sides. Such a curious reaction.
At her next question, he rolls a scarred and stained shoulder. “I have lived many places.” He shakes his head, frustrated at how easily he falls into the habit of slipping away from the truth. “I’m sorry,” the words feel foreign on his tongue. “It is difficult to not be so evasive.” He clears his throat. “I currently don’t have a real home. I am watching over my sister in Tephra, and I have loosely given my support to Nerine, but I don’t consider either my home.” At her next question, he grows a little quieter, his brows knitting together. “My name is very large and far reaching, but I only really care about my twin sister.”
The one trapped beneath a sleep woven from her own magic.
A constant presence in the back of his mind.
“What of you, Wallace? I know you live here and previously lived on Ischia and little else."
woolf
I am loathed to say it's the devil's taste
