04-29-2020, 11:05 PM
i feel
a bad moon rising
a bad moon rising
The slowing of the creature across from her provides Lepis little comfort. His talons no longer tear into the red earth, his wings no longer hover so stiff in the air at his sides. (Her own are tense and slightly unfurled, a feathered and not-insignificant enhancement of her diminutive size). Ghaul speaks of Anaxarete and of being too young for his father’s throne. He is Litotes son, Lepis realizes, but she sees nothing of the golden lion in the monster in front of her. So he’d gotten his looks from his mother then, whoever she was. Not the Hyaline queen, Lepis thinks, but the details she might have once known have faded into the blur of the past.
They’re pushed away farther still by the creature’s questions. They’re questions she has not asked herself, but for good reason.
The right thing to do would be to allow the entirety of Beqanna to pass judgement and choose his sentence. And the only sentence he deserves – or will deserve by the time he is caught – is surely death.
Magicians cannot cure him, minds with knowledge are out of reach. The penalty for the Curse is death, and the penalty of the Curse is the soul of the executioner. That is how it’s always been. She has told Oceane that she will be the executioner, leaving death at her own hand an unspoken promise. That she fears she might fail when the time comes is a secret Lepis admits not even to herself.
As he speaks, Lepis steadies her breathing. Slowly, her jittering hooves still, and though her wings are still angled for quick flight she shifts her weight so that she is not so immediately poised to leap upward. The ease in her posture is not natural, but her mind is clear when she answers. "I have always set my own fires, Ghaul of Pangea. And I no longer have the stomach for fealty that I once did. I do not trust you to know my family from my foe, nor to be the judge of crime and weakness." Her words are firm, as is the set of her navy mouth and the flared lines of her own wings that has mirrored the dragon’s.
"But," she continues, just before the silence is too long, an artist at the skill of conversation: "Help me build the pyre for my own revenge, and in return I will not stop your blaze when it comes, or shelter the unworthy from its fires. "
They’re pushed away farther still by the creature’s questions. They’re questions she has not asked herself, but for good reason.
The right thing to do would be to allow the entirety of Beqanna to pass judgement and choose his sentence. And the only sentence he deserves – or will deserve by the time he is caught – is surely death.
Magicians cannot cure him, minds with knowledge are out of reach. The penalty for the Curse is death, and the penalty of the Curse is the soul of the executioner. That is how it’s always been. She has told Oceane that she will be the executioner, leaving death at her own hand an unspoken promise. That she fears she might fail when the time comes is a secret Lepis admits not even to herself.
As he speaks, Lepis steadies her breathing. Slowly, her jittering hooves still, and though her wings are still angled for quick flight she shifts her weight so that she is not so immediately poised to leap upward. The ease in her posture is not natural, but her mind is clear when she answers. "I have always set my own fires, Ghaul of Pangea. And I no longer have the stomach for fealty that I once did. I do not trust you to know my family from my foe, nor to be the judge of crime and weakness." Her words are firm, as is the set of her navy mouth and the flared lines of her own wings that has mirrored the dragon’s.
"But," she continues, just before the silence is too long, an artist at the skill of conversation: "Help me build the pyre for my own revenge, and in return I will not stop your blaze when it comes, or shelter the unworthy from its fires. "
@[Ghaul]
