#ayther

Their eyes met when his stare lingered for too long, and her expression brightened to a little smirk. 

What does she think she’s playing at? He was extra glad now that he hadn’t taken any of her candy at the bar. 

She didn’t belong here. She was beautiful in the way a well crafted sword or knife was, all pointed lines and well-concealed cruelty. She was the type of girl a man’d let gut him, and if he didn’t look away now, he was worried he’d get caught just the same.

Their staring contest ends when Dawson calls her name: “Blythe, my dear. Why don’t we introduce everyone to our guest for the evening?” 

Blythe.

My dear.

For a reason he couldn’t quite place, his heart sank. 

So she was Dawson’s girl. Of course she was. Of course Dawson would find a moldable little thing to fold and squeeze into his own personal killing machine. Nice to look at, easy to boss around, and loyal enough to drop any man who went against her master. She was on a leash and she didn’t even know it. Or maybe she did, and she liked the feel of it. A leash was a promise, after all, a reminder that, at the very least, someone wouldn’t let you run off.

tfw your future girlfriend interrupts you peeing by throwing your coat in your face

from earlier:

In this moment, she was kneeling at the altar, staring up at the eye of their god, and it was alive. Which was particularly upsetting, for a girl of twelve, who had been told her whole life that the aforementioned god was dead, missing, or some combination of both.

Those around her were singing in well-practiced harmony, their voices echoing around the chambers of the Grand Cathedral in a great and lovely cacophony. Even as she sang along with them, she could feel their eyes on the back of her head, tracing the line of the softly glowing halo around her head, the perfect ringlets of her golden hair that Isadora had spent hours curling this morning, the silk of her new dress. There were a hundred pairs of eyes on her at any given moment, stripping her bare with their simultaneous judgment and reverence. She kept her eyes forward. She could bear the weight of their gazes. She had for this long, and she would do it forever if that was what it took to earn their devotion. She was special, just like the Herald said. She could do everything they could do and more. She was given the best meals, the finest dresses, all deserved and all in thanks for the burden of being the one to bring their god home to them. He was waiting, biding his time, and Cami would spring him from his proverbial, or perhaps literal) prison, and they would all be grateful for it. If she had to be a girl of twelve with only one friend, a girl of twelve with a thousand secrets spilling out of her head, a girl of twelve with the weight of heaven upon her back, so be it.

The first time he spoke to her, she had been eight or nine, no more than a babe in the eyes of those around her, but chosen all the same. No one would believe her then, so she had kept her mouth shut. They would have said the Herald was playing favorites, that she was exaggerating and desperate to be the best and brightest of The Herald’s pupils. Even if she was the brightest, which was without a doubt was, it wasn’t their concern. Nothing spread quicker than gossip through the congregation. So she had kept silent. Truthfully, she had thought for the longest time that someone was fooling with her. Mindspeak was forbidden during service. Everything must be laid bare, The Herald always said, we must hide nothing from our god. 

What if your god was what you were hiding?

Her knees were beginning to ache now, the hard marble of the kneeling bench digging into the delicate flesh of her knees. She shifted ever so slightly, a practiced motion since girlhood, though she was not much past that. When no tap to her shoulder or swat to the back of her head came, though, she breathed a sigh of relief as the pressure on her legs lifted ever so slightly. She repeated the correct Verses along with the rest of the crowd from her position beside the Herald, eyes closed and breath shallow. As she pretended not to feel the source of her discomfort looming over her left side, Cami felt the voice of her god creep into her mind.

He never truly spoke, but his messages usually consisted of one of three things: distorted images of forests and other places on the ground that she had never been to, so bright and luscious she was sure they were not real and instead a depiction of paradise. They certainly were nothing like the rigid and organized gardens of her home, where plucked-bare trees grew in straight rows, twisted into great statues by Haven’s many talented gardeners. Sometimes he sent pictures of people, though they were not like her. They were ugly, somewhere between man and beast, with scaly faces and sharp, fin-like ears. Sometimes there were no images, only a strange sense of longing that grew to a pounding headache behind her eyes. She pondered often if perhaps he was speaking some sort of language, and she just had yet to learn it. She had scoured all of the books on the Old Tongue in the library and found nothing that stood out to her.

This time, the picture was of a babe-- it’s round, chubby cheeks pinched and probed by a bodiless hand. She tried to decipher the message but came up with nothing beyond a foreign warmth filling her cold body. She turned the image over and over in her head, trying to piece it together with the other things he had sent her previously.

Are you lonely? Cami sent back to the great shape in front of her-- an ovular shadow blocking out the light from the chandeliers floating above them, the size of man but nothing like one. I’m here. If it is a child you need, I will be so. She figured he must be, after all, what good was a language when no one else could speak it? What good was a family that worshiped and loved you if you could not speak to them? She would be lonely too, if she had no one to talk to. At least she had Isadora to accompany her wherever she went, even if her lady’s maid was forced to be her friend. I’m here, she promised, I’m not going anywhere.

She cracked open her right eye, the one out of view of the Herald, so slowly she was sure no one would notice, glancing to the center of the altar. She repeated her words, sending them floating through the air to him, looking towards the dead-and-missing-god, hoping he could hear. She imagined them piercing the shining surface of his cage, embedding themselves like the arrows the guards fired at their training dummies in the courtyard below her window. She would stare at them for hours, watching and wondering if they knew. If they understood– their god was right here with them–why wasn’t anyone else listening? Perhaps no one else was worthy after all, just as the Herald said. He never lied, even if it was hurtful. It was bad to lie to your family. Every lie was a stone in hand, and eventually they would send you toppling over the edge and falling down to the ground below.