'sweet lamb,' heat purled into cataclysmic menace. his breath brushed at her cheek. death hung in the threading of this breath, galaxies of brute elitism forming cruel ice sat their gaze upon her. he'd won her. as they were always in need to do. to collect. to enforce. to preen in their vainglorious blood-matted machinations of force. he supped on her fear, drawn into the shudder of her flesh and the subtle retreat as he guided her and her kin into his gangland. grinning sinister fool. and all she could was the disoriented figure of her sire, collapsing from defeat, from age, succumbing into something she could only guess to be heartbreak. 'to the lion goeth the reward.'
☽ ◯ ☾
his handiwork lacked the gracile fingerwork of expertise. it was clumsy, it was rushed. far too haphazard to bring a promising end to such dismal chapters. he owed her nothing. but, he knew her story.
fate brought the half-siblings together, and hearing of such tragedies softened his otherwise flint exterior. armance would leave her on the shoreline, once he affirmed their escape was made clean. he forced a smile at the whimsy hanging on her face: the elation, and reprieve from the cruelties marking the last of her youth. she looked at him with hope, with need: a silent prayer he would not abandon her as she'd been so many times before. and though they exchanged unison, looks of equal parts camaraderie and expedited familiarity, he too, would turn away and do as many had done before. she watched him with the ghost of a glower, though understood their paths were meant to part.
she knew just as well as he, the unkindness of the place they'd left behind. she knew, with fresh chapters one must leave their ghosts behind. she was only a reminder of what he'd nearly had, nearly lost. their family, in all their unwarranted cruelty, espoused a manner of kindness to the bastard son of hector: a stay from mourning.
orphea stood alone. wintry air crawled across her, pilling the wetness of her travels in frost. it collected at the subtle feathering of her heels and in the wooliness of her winter coat. but the sun shone brightly, birthing a false sense of warmth. attentions turned, wheeled from the departing figure of armance and towards the commons. inquisition fed into glassy eyes, pinching the expression with thought. her stride was slow, cautioned. doe-like limbs, lean, fell into whispers of movement. ears and eyes were cupped to every snap of twig, every crunch against snow and ice, and the chittering of the island's lesser creatures.
◯RPHEA