like breaking diamonds with your hands
They sighed together, a language that transcended words and bodies—peace and good intentions (or, well, the lack of immediately bad ones; Mauja had lived with snakes long enough to know the difference).
And yet they were both predators: their eyes met again, an awkward affair between their species. Perhaps that, too, should've told her that he was no ordinary horse, that he was something more, but it was not a difference that he understood. It was not a difference that mattered to him. He was simply Mauja: glacial, distant, lost on some mountainside or another.
So he was content to inspect her hands, to take in her peculiar scent, and to still underneath her foreign touch. Those dexterous and clawless appendages stroked the soft skin of his warm nose, traveled up the straight profile of his head, soothing and so utterly unlike anything he had ever experienced before—
What was this? It was so unlike the only touch he had known—seduction and violence, both like fire—that he didn't know whether to be offended or pleased. As her fingers traced patterns around his forehead he labeled it dangerous, yet he made no effort to stop her. He figured he had the advantage at this distance anyway, because—
Because—
Because everything in him froze, a sudden breath of winter and everything iced over.
Because her hands had so expertly trailed across the space where his horn should've grown, where it would've spiraled out of his skull, one of two weapons never denied to him: and it was not there and he didn't remember it breaking and there was no blood, no pain, no nothing, just like Irma had been nothing—
She swept in lower, and he saw himself through her eyes: tall, underfed, off-white, hornless.
His first thought was of Ulrik, d'Artagnan, Crowley, even Psyche—hers had been broken, the rest would laugh at him. Taunt him. Doubt him? Kill him?
Somewhere, there was a painful irony. He, the Bane of the Plague, had had his horn nicked by whatever had put him there.
Time did not care about the unraveling of his reality, though; it kept on ticking, flowing, and with it, his heart kept on beating, his lungs breathing. Slowly, imperceptibly, Mauja returned to life, his ears moving to the slightest sounds, his eyes roving from detail to detail, veins clogged with dread.
But oh, how he wished to die in that moment, to sink through snow and rock into the mountain's heart, saved from his trials and his shame and ended in the bliss of a stranger's far too intimate touch. It made him want to bury his head in her arms and fall asleep. Unnerved by such an impulse he lifted his head away from her touch, hiding behind the answer to compose himself; he peered meaningfully up the slope and the disturbed snow.
Without a voice, it was the best answer he could give.
And yet they were both predators: their eyes met again, an awkward affair between their species. Perhaps that, too, should've told her that he was no ordinary horse, that he was something more, but it was not a difference that he understood. It was not a difference that mattered to him. He was simply Mauja: glacial, distant, lost on some mountainside or another.
So he was content to inspect her hands, to take in her peculiar scent, and to still underneath her foreign touch. Those dexterous and clawless appendages stroked the soft skin of his warm nose, traveled up the straight profile of his head, soothing and so utterly unlike anything he had ever experienced before—
What was this? It was so unlike the only touch he had known—seduction and violence, both like fire—that he didn't know whether to be offended or pleased. As her fingers traced patterns around his forehead he labeled it dangerous, yet he made no effort to stop her. He figured he had the advantage at this distance anyway, because—
Because—
Because everything in him froze, a sudden breath of winter and everything iced over.
Because her hands had so expertly trailed across the space where his horn should've grown, where it would've spiraled out of his skull, one of two weapons never denied to him: and it was not there and he didn't remember it breaking and there was no blood, no pain, no nothing, just like Irma had been nothing—
She swept in lower, and he saw himself through her eyes: tall, underfed, off-white, hornless.
His first thought was of Ulrik, d'Artagnan, Crowley, even Psyche—hers had been broken, the rest would laugh at him. Taunt him. Doubt him? Kill him?
Somewhere, there was a painful irony. He, the Bane of the Plague, had had his horn nicked by whatever had put him there.
Time did not care about the unraveling of his reality, though; it kept on ticking, flowing, and with it, his heart kept on beating, his lungs breathing. Slowly, imperceptibly, Mauja returned to life, his ears moving to the slightest sounds, his eyes roving from detail to detail, veins clogged with dread.
But oh, how he wished to die in that moment, to sink through snow and rock into the mountain's heart, saved from his trials and his shame and ended in the bliss of a stranger's far too intimate touch. It made him want to bury his head in her arms and fall asleep. Unnerved by such an impulse he lifted his head away from her touch, hiding behind the answer to compose himself; he peered meaningfully up the slope and the disturbed snow.
Without a voice, it was the best answer he could give.
