i am the vanguard of your destruction

She was bitten on her birthday,
And now a face in the crowd, she's not.
And I suspected now forever the shape
She came to escape, is forgot.

She had a raven's eyes—sharp, dark, calculating. For all that she gave nothing away, she was not dull. She was like the shadows, the night, full of a different kind of life than that which roamed in daylight. Keen. But just as secretive as the darkness.

But not dead. There was nothing dead in her sharp gaze, in the way her attention seemed pinned on him, hanging on to every word that fell from his tired lips, formed by an equally tired mind. Was he going to get lost in his own winding thoughts and attempts to shield himself with words, or would honesty slip off his tongue, if he wasn't quick enough to check the string of syllables he was starting to formulate? Every other second his gaze sharpened, only to grow dull again, gray in the lackluster light. The jolt she'd given him with her intrusion was starting to wear off.

Was it just his imagination, or did his question give her pause? Was that a hush, a lull in her breathing? Blinking, he let his eyes trail along her face again. Ah, yes. She was frowning at him. Considering how much they gave away otherwise, it could just as well have been a boulder falling from the sky to land before their feet. Clearly, he'd caught her off guard with that one, and he felt like smirking.

"No," she started to say, offering the same argument Seiren had tried to use against him, when he was telling her to go. A weapon. Wings and a horn. But it was a trade, information for information, and she countered his question with one of her own, hidden in the cold nuances of her voice. She lacked inflection. She did not lack life. She poked and prodded, bit and worried, and he felt too tired to swipe at her, shake her loose, and leave with his secrets.

"Fortunately," he countered her with an absent-minded air, yet his gaze had grown sharp again. He hoped he'd picked up correctly on her repetition of the term he'd used about casting her out, that it wasn't a subconscious coincidence, but a barbed hook she was poking him with.

He wasn't interested in getting stuck on it.

"But to answer your question, I told her not to—though, I'll hardly claim the glory for her 'doing as I said'. I guess her interests merely happened to coincide with the nature of my order." Seiren had always struck him as sly, with her dark eyes and calculated words; she'd had some kind of plan all along, hadn't she? Whispering of a weapon above the body of her newborn child.. had he put a stick on the wheel for her, done something she hadn't counted on?

Surely, outcast and no longer beholden to Mauja, she would simply have killed Ghost in cold blood if it had fit her schemes better.