Lheorvine Ukris never was a man of many words. Rarely did our banter spill into a conversation, and I myself was wary of that eventuality; whenever we talked, something was bound to go terribly wrong sooner or later.
During one such chat , he grabbed my shoulders with so much verve that I had thought he was about to kill me for whatever insensitivity I had just uttered. Nefertari’s whip cracked in the air behind us, but Lheor was too close; had he decided to end me there, my alien maiden would’ve been powerless to stop him.
“Your eyes,” he wheezed a menacing hiss into my face, “they are not as they used to be.”
“What?” I managed, stumped and a little terrified.
“We spoke yesterday,” Lheor’s voice shook with the uncertainty of a man suspecting himself of sudden madness, “we spoke yesterday, and I am sure that your eyes were different.”
I thought of Ezekyle, of his golden sight. Drach’nyen drew a gilded sheen over his eyes; did the fiend at last find its way into my mind?
“Dark, always dark,” Lheor mumbled frantically, his steel grip tightening, “not green. You’re not Iskandar Khayon.”
“I would’ve known an impostor before anybody,” Nefertari leapt to us like a shadow and brought her crystalline claws before the raging warrior, “calm yourself, you mongrel beast.”
“Explain,” Lheor seethed. Never before had I been so grateful for the layer of ceramite coating my body.
“It’s sorcery,” Nefertari’s words oozed sardonic poison, “ magic, mon’keigh. He rests, he wakes, he stares into a mirror and cries ‘Unlovely! Unlovely! Unlovely!’ until he’s satisfied with the man that stares back at him.”
Lheor wasn’t content with that answer. Neither was I, but I wasn’t given space to protest Nefertari’s mockery, not with Lheor shaking me.
“Are you telling me he’s been a shapeshifter this entire time?” he yelled, little daemons of immaterial spite bleeding from his skull, “how much of this is real?!”
“All of it,” I finally spoke. No longer able to serve as my mouthpiece, Nefertari drew away from us to give in to a cackling fit. “I’ve excellent genetics, thank you very much. I only toy with the minor—”
He leaned in with a murderous stare, and I wisely took it as a cue to not say any more. Like a goldsmith working a precious gem, Lheor inspected the blue-green of my iris, growing more exasperated by the second. I thought of telling him of the nostalgia that guided my biomantic hand, the memory of Prosperine seas, but he wouldn’t have understood. He hated my sentimentality almost as much as he hated the Art.
“One day, you’ll die,” he growled, an unusual clarity to his threat, “not to blades, or hunger, or disease, but to your own vanity.”
He stopped crushing me then, and turned to leave with a chain of grumbled insults. I looked after him, not doubting the truth of his prophecy for a second; as if to confirm its absurdity, Nefertari’s laughter echoed into the endless night.
litle fun thing written for @rowscara as a follow-up to our conversation regarding Khayon’s undisclosed eye color 🙃
