09-10-2017, 12:53 AM
You're looking at an absolute zero;
I'm not the devil but I won't be your hero.
”How could I forget?”I'm not the devil but I won't be your hero.
His own voice emerges from the depth of his throat, rough from disuse and jagged along the edges – it is barely more than a growl, though there is a flicker of light hidden away within the darkness of his gaze. There is a faint shadow of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth as he is drawn away from the cliffside and closer to her; she is a flickering flame herself – he dare not touch her, though the thought of it is alluring and tantalizing both (her name is more than befitting). She is as beautiful as he remembered, and as full of sharp wit – there is a chuckle rumbling from the hearth of his chest, not unlike the volcano that stirred restlessly amid the islands he had come to know so well.
Tucked neatly to each side lay her finely preened feathers, glittering in the dwindling sunlight – sable and rust against the pale sea, as the sun fades slowly beyond the horizon, leaving a starlit sky and a rising moon in its wake. He wondered, for a moment, what she might be thinking – he can see the tension in her jawline, and the heavy crease of her brow, despite her wayward forelock draping over her golden eyes. His own humor is lost, then – leaving behind a thin, straight line across the dark shadow of his mouth. Her mind is elsewhere – preoccupied with a much more urgent matter.
He understood all too well how difficult it could be to put the worries of a kingdom aside.
”Are you thinking of Taiga?” he murmurs then, his voice low as a sweeping gust of wind glides over the precipice, caressing the puckered scarring of his skin and weaving its way through her tightly knit feathers. ”I felt much the same way after Pangea fell – wary, unsure,” and he pauses then, his scarlet gaze peering out into the sea – the very same unsettled sea that had swallowed all the rest. ”but I have noticed that each time a land has been taken, it has been because of greed – and because of power.”
He thinks then of Hyaline – of Nayl – perhaps he had been too hasty in his judgement of her – would he not be as angry as she had been, if the roles had been reversed? He is looking beyond her, then, into the tropical terrain that was not unlike the wild, overgrown rainforest of yesteryear – with the soft whisper of a powerful and unyielding sea, lapping along the shoreline below. The fire had held onto him tightly then, and he had been angry himself, frustrated by his own failure and driven by a force out of his own control. He had been defensive, wary – he had every right to be, he knew, having gone into Hyaline with no knowledge of what he might find – but perhaps he had been too much so. Too guarded.
Too guarded.
It summarized him well.
OFFSPRING
another zealot with the weight of the fucking world