It feels like stepping into something worn and familiar. Something formed to the shape of him, the threads of it softened by time and use. He is not a sentimental man, but he can appreciate the comfort of it, the way that it feels to have her step near him as she had always done—the scent of her like a remembered dream. And yet. Yet, it is not familiar at all because she is not as she was. She is something new entirely.
And what about her has ever been as boring as habit?
He thrills at the closeness of her, at the rasp of her smoky voice, but his face doesn’t give away such carnal pleasure. Instead it’s just a wisp of a smile on his elegant lips, something that gleams in his impossibly dark eyes. “You are never tied to anything,” he murmurs, reaching over and pressing his lips into the wildness of her mane, breathing her in slowly. “Least of all land.”
Tongue to teeth and then lip as he pulls back, the vines reaching out to her slightly. She could burn them, he realizes suddenly—not knowing how or why. He has no reason to think that she has new gifts to call her own, but there’s something about her that is different. Impossibly more powerful than before.
“But if anyone could restore glory to nothing but a shell…,” his voice trails off as he he ends with a laugh that is more smoke than figure. Teeth graze over her neck as though it had been no time at all since he had last been here. Since they had danced around one another. Since they had passed like ships in the night. Her into the legends of Beqanna and he into the wilderness. She had children by others, he knew, and although he was not a possessive man, he was not evolved enough to not feel the sting of jealousy.
He closes the distance as she steps away, his lips trailing up to her ears where he whispers softly.
“You miss me?”
for so long have my teeth held my tongue from a venomous voice
but the poison has passed from my lips to my hands, an incendiary ploy