I was looking for a breath of life
another taste of divine rush
Wow, Kushiel isn’t the brightest bulb in the packet if he thinks that Shaytan is going into labor. He’s probably never seen a birth (not that Shaytan remembers Sayaa’s and the dead one’s either). Shaytan half laughs, half snorts at his question and it comes out off rather… deranged? Loopy. This is the second time she’s found someone - or someone interrupted her - while she was with the tree. And Shaytan did not like that. She had nothing to call her own, nothing to draw Straia’s eyes, and so the one thing she clings to now is this tree. Her child is all but forgotten and even the thirst for bunny blood takes a back seat. Her dreams are filled with flickering flames, fire the does not consume or burn until it does, and turns into a raven, and then she always welcomes the dream death.
But Kushiel’s flames are not like the tree’s flames. They are normal. They have heat and they can singe her skin, but it doesn’t stop the rampaging spotted bull. Not until he has some distance from her, and even more from the sacred fire.
Her single-mindedness is remarkable. It is, perhaps, the only potentially positive remarkable thing about Shaytan. That and her devotion, which is a form of obsession, stubbornness, and determination of its own.
She gives him a narrowed, sideways look, as if he is hiding something. Whether his words have any effect or not is unclear, but she calms once he is a decent ways away. “Yes.” she says, simply. “This is mine. My space. You stay over there.” Like a child, she has irrationally claimed the space as her own. And woe betide anyone who came into it without bringing her a present - without something that would satisfy her.
Three guesses as to what that might be, and the first two don’t count.
Shaytan
so many lives
so many pairs of eyes