Foggy Bottom Way ratero

the richly appointed room was filled with light. a morose prince, hardly more than a boy, played senet with a servant girl who looked on him with adoring eyes. she had seen past his melancholy into the core of his inner furnace, fed by longing and love. here she had placed herself, a grain of sand in the heart of a ticking watch, and now the springs had run dry, now the mechanisms were snapping. the boy was fading, and in her dreams silvertongue fell twice as she ran after his dissolving memory. she awoke to blackness, then pain, then the slow blinking awareness that crawls over one's shoulders in an unwanted cowl. first, she was not dead, and now she stared back into the worried, haunted eyes she had intended to escape. for a time all silvertongue found herself able to do was stare at the creek wolf. the laugh was a thin, exasperated rasp, self-deprecating and mad until it became tears, and then her face twisted. he'd thrown her aside for purity; that was the only truth she knew. akavir had put her away but still seemed insistent on finding her in the most horrendous moments. "go home, akavir," silvertongue said in deadened voice, sitting upright with effort and cradling her forepaw against her chest. should he move to touch her again, the hair-thin control would snap, and with it her teeth. the stranger was at last noted, a pretty unknown with striking eyes that seemed dreamscape. but her own were again and only for akavir, who had become the vehicle for her own hatred and self loathing, and it showed in the tremble of chin and mouth, the hardness of her eyes. "you will not let me die in peace?" silvertongue demanded, a sing-song tease edged in razored ice.