Already damned, she would be nothing if she allowed a child to speak to her with such disrespect. What was paltry magic, easily shorn away by the unraveling of those who had loaned it to her? What were flames, to one who would simply rise again from them, whole, again and again, to eternally chase the unfortunate through the remainder of their hours? Grains of sand in an inverted jar, they were, or beings trapped beneath ice, in swiftly chilling waters. Beloved stood over them, outside the glass, over the frost, aloft without wings.
She smiles, and cackles. While, at first, it’s a maddened titter, the more the little wench carries on, the harder she laughs, until her neck is curled down into her breast, and tears leak from her wild eyes. Rising, loudly, the guffaw of the wicked one suddenly stills, her harsh whisper of inhalation cutting the babbling sound of her voice like a knife.
"We may weave and cast vain airs, too. Behold! Kunt thabat 'ahmaq," mocks (you are proven a fool, in the tongue of her foremothers, and but one of many she has learned in over thirty years of ever-life, and the only one of which she truly recalls the origin) and croons onward the demoness, over the crackle of Kiada’s fires, "what power lies within breath one cannot comprehend, commands none may follow? It is fair you do not know, Child of Fire. You hold sight of very few Moons, and have walked but one thread in the weave of All."
In so far as not killing her, the witch’s eyes narrow, her lips curving into a twisted, broad grin. Who suffers death, of those here?
Not she.
"You will die, then?" she cackles, almost as amused by this truth as she is by the brazen nature of mortal children, "we are not the same. What would togetherness forge with such soft metal at its heart?"
Pretty but frail, this brat, and Beloved doesn’t arm herself with ornaments, at least not such sizeable ones. She is to tell the fire-wielder as much next, when, suddenly, a voice reaches through their conversation (for the wicked one, however bestial, however hungry, does not consider this an argument so much as an affront to what she considers common decency, owed to whatever feeble twines bind her to such courteousness). Her eyes shoot about the world, finding purchase on the glow of the Altar, and suddenly, she forgets that she’d been chiding the girl at all, or speaking of the Dark, for the Dark is among them.
As He speaks of the pendants, she looks to them, her eyes following the arc of the flowers which had deposited them, and roving across the metallic gleam of the necklace itself. Swiftly, without much thought, she does as she is told, eager to lay claim to the power he promises.
"Guide us to these doors," she laughs, her grin dark, and growing all the more malevolent the more terrible boons she promptly imagines herself receiving.
What was fire, to that? she madly giggles to herself as she inspects her new trinket and the reflection of her features on its metallic faces, as if she’s forgotten Kiada is there at all.
|
.svg/2000px-Google_Chrome_icon_(2011).svg.png){kind=icon}
