etro --
in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon,
I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom
She almost forgets that he is there, although they are flesh to flesh, she pressing against as she had always done to Kingslay. (And he had left, as he would always do—again, and again.) She can almost forget that he is there before he is not—not to her. She is young again and her hips slope awkwardly, her body an impossible blend of breeds. She is carved from mud and there are entire galaxies trapped in her mouth. She is fearless and curious and all things that young things are. She is a princess. She is just a girl.
And he…
Oh, he.
He is savage and fearsome and beautiful. He is a predator: wolf among lambs. He smells of life and tastes of death, and from the first time that she was around him, she is addicted. He was heroin on her tongue.
He clogged her senses—made her blind to the truth.
She loved him as the moon loves the sun. She chased him, eternally. She let him go. She spent the years of the in-between waiting for the rare moments of solace in his presence.
Pollack is against her chest and beneath her lips but he is not he and the fear will not leave. It will not leave her alone. It beats against the back of skull, incessant in tempo, relentless in beat. She is shaking like an autumn leaf, and she is only a second away from falling. Everything she had known. Everything that she had always accepted crumbling beneath this false reality that he was crafting for her.
He pulls the knife back from her chest, and she rises from beneath the muck of her fear—gasping for air, eyes wild. She almost does not notice the warning shot that he takes at her, at least does not flinch. The reprieve, as brief as it was, was enough for her to grip onto the corners of reality, to feel around her.
Anger surges through her veins, as unfamiliar of a feeling as any, and she realizes that the reprieve will not last. The fear was coming back, she can feel it. The way that it rolls across the ground like fog in the early morning, waiting to choke her. Waiting to pull her down. She can feel not-Kingslay there, along the very corners of her mind—waiting as predators do. The illusion of him waiting and cold and dangerous.
She takes a step back, muddy eyes narrowing. “Enough!” she bellows, her voice forceful, commanding. She calls upon her very nature, wielding the negation in the same manner that she had always suppressed it. It was a curse, a defect, a disease, and she had no love for it, but she needs it now. She reaches out her mental grip and calls—and it rises like a phoenix to her demands. Her eyes glitter with fury as she looks to the stallion who was not Kingslay, the illusion peeling back to reveal the reality of him.
“How dare you,” she finally spits, derision and disgust apparent in every word.
-- vanquish and yael's trait-negating desert princess --
