i am the mace, the map, the fall and the high
She can’t know of the secrets he pulls from her very skin, the ones surrounding her like a fine mist. Neither does he enlighten her with his strange question. She can’t know it is her memories where he finds all her cutting edges. The razor tongue that delights him even before he hears it cut the air between them.
She cannot possibly know any of that, so the biting rejoinder is everything he had hoped it could be. He laughs, unable to help himself. He has no doubt she had wished to find a tender place on him with her insult, but Reave has little in the way left of shame. And perhaps it’s true, what she says. Perhaps he is little more than a shallow puddle spread before her in which to wet her hoof-tips.
Or perhaps it is what he wants the world to believe.
“Do you always frown at flowers?” he asks in return, his voice light and redolent with the laughter still dying in his throat. He meets her gaze with a bold grin, matching eyes crinkled instead of narrowed. He tilts his head, shifting as she raises her face to the sun as though she were one of the aforementioned flowers following its light.
His curiosity is not dimmed by her dismissal. Instead it is piqued by the way her features seem to soften, her voice losing its edge when she continues. He nearly laughs again at the question. Strangely, it is not one he has ever been asked before. Reave has watched others flinch away and stare in horror. He has watched them dismiss it as though it were nothing, pretending away whatever discomfort seeing it brings them. As though one could forget the sight of bone rupturing flesh like it had been cracked in half and pushed through.
There is no comfort in seeing something burst from skin that would spell death for anyone else.
“If they are, no one bothered to inform them of it,” he replies with a wicked grin. “Why? Do they make you uncomfortable?”
reave
@revelrie