is it too late? ; straia

[Kingslay]

KINGSLAY

The ash is falling around them like snow; bright, and paper-thin, far too light for the laws of gravity, and so it wafts to and fro on the wind until it settles between the lengths of their dark eyelashes and along the mountainous ridges of their spines. Here and there it coats the earth is patches, is sucked into their lungs as they inhale and exhale in unison. Kingslay does not fight the death of his fire though, instead he sits back on his heels as the ash and smoke blankets them from the prying eyes of all the bodies he did not want.

“Liar,” he says, but the word is lost to the smoke and the cacophonous echo of the ravens wings and bellows.

Liar, because she promised her to him. Liar, because she reeked of betrayal – because she reeked of the living, of him. ‘Liar,’ he breathes against the skin of her ear, and she is not startled or breathless. He cannot feel the thrum of her heart quicken. He cannot smell the sweat on her skin, or taste it as it mingles with the flavor of soot and ash on his tongue. He should not be surprised. He had known that she would know.

He had known that she would blink up at him with her dark eyes, and she does, and had he been thinking of more than the crippling hunger writhing in his gut he might have noticed how she reminded him of the witches, the ones that kissed him with the dirtied ends of their curling, jagged fingernails, the ones that carved trenches through his flesh when he had blood to bleed. Had he thought beyond the need for the iron tang of blood on his lips he might have realized that she reminded him of that night when it was all stripped away – flesh and bone and fat and gristle. He might have known that she reminded him of magic murmurs in the depths of ancient dark forests – that she was wicked, too.

But instead of realizations he listens to the thrum of her pulse. “We are not the type to be loved, Kingslay,” she says, and he focuses on the way the syllables sound on her tongue, and he wonders if they will ever sound like the way they did in Etro’s mouth. He blinks, and sees the maggots in her eyes. He blinks, and sees the skin fall away and expose the rot of innards and muscle. He blinks, and the ash and smoke curl around their too-close bodies and he wonders what she might look like alight. Liar.

“Remember what we are,” she says, and he simmers in silence and remembers the way their eyes burned holes through his flesh and bone, the wide berth they yielded him in the meadow.

“Everyone else does.”

“Fix it.” He says, and the ravens catch fire. They spiral to the chamber floor in plumes of billowing smoke and burning feathers. Their screams are jarring, discordant, but Straia will not mind. They are monsters after all.

And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.

KINGSLAY BY NEVAEH | HTML BY MAAT | IMAGE © ILYA KISARADOV

ignore the raven part if straia is not cool with that, which is fair also feel free to douse him in water or something embarrassing