Cummings Carole Wolf's own 3 Koan

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.A knife would have been quicker, a simple surge of power easier, but he’d wanted to feel the pulse slow and sputter, he’d wanted to watch the life spark out of those eyes that were too like his own.Malick generally got what he wanted.Wolf’s law wouldn’t allow Malick to bury the corpse and so bind his father to the earth.Malick sulked a bit as he watched the pyre, but he obeyed.He was Kamen Wolf’s-own, and he respected his god.And then, out of the blue and all unlooked-for, there had been Skel.Malick hadn’t been impressed by Skel’s perfect face.Malick hadn’t been impressed by Skel’s raven-black hair, or his cobalt eyes, or the lines of his body, or the way he moved it.Malick had been impressed by the carefree nature with which Skel approached life; the hard practicality with which he lived it.Skel was fierce and beautiful and whimsical and foolish.When he’d tested Malick in a seedy tavern—Malick somewhat drunk and grieving his mother all over again, grieving all those he’d already outlived, still smelling of the smoke and incense from his father’s pyre, and wondering if acquiescing to being the bloody hand of Wolf’s long arm on mortal lands had been such a brilliant idea after all—Malick had been struck not by the pleasing angles of Skel’s face, or the open invitation in his too-blue eyes; Malick had been struck by the tiny hints of fracture behind the reckless audacity.The singular pinpoint of satori that Skel was just as broken inside as anyone else; perilous enough to be interesting, and yet still strangely safe.Skel was Temshiel.Skel couldn’t die.He’d been beautiful in his way, in more than the aesthetic sense, though he was, of course, extraordinarily aesthetically gifted.His sense of justice was perhaps a bit rigid, to Malick’s mind, but it lit his soul with such a bright fiery blaze sometimes that Malick couldn’t look away.Blinded.Skel was beauty and distraction and laughter and forgetfulness.Skel was friend and sometime-lover; touchstone and confidant; role model and bad example.Malick had thought Skel wouldn’t take a cudgel to the face for anyone.He’d been wrong.There had been Asai and foolish choices and betrayal and bewildered grief, and then there had been no more Skel.Malick finally felt the true weight of what he was.What he’d chosen.What his god had made him, and what he’d allowed himself to become.Malick looked Kamen in the eye, and… flinched.He retreated.Umeia didn’t need to.Umeia was much better than Malick at being what they were.Still, Umeia had come with him.Malick would regret that eventually, but at the time, he’d been grateful.Always enamored with beauty, and now it hovered just out of Malick’s reach.No matter how many drinks he poured down his throat, no matter how many beds he fell into.He searched for it in the wrong places—pink lips, light-stubbled chins, firm breasts, muscled backs, pleasing faces, sweet-scented skin—he knew he was looking in the wrong places, but he couldn’t bear to look within.If he found it, he might lose it.He loved with little splinters of himself he didn’t mind risking, and nursed with liquor and more liquor the shriveled part of his spirit that hunkered inside him and hardened into a snarling little knot.He observed the world around him with ever-growing contempt, nurturing his useless craving for vengeance, while he watched and waited.And then, out of the blue and all unlooked-for, there had been Fen.Malick had thought, right up until Fen had shot him that first hate-filled glare, that he’d been waiting for a chance at retribution.He’d been wrong.He’d thought at first that he was enamored with Fen’s aesthetic beauty.Angular and sharp-boned, every slant and slope in exactly the right place.Eyes like storm clouds over a roiling sea, flecked through with the light of the suns forcing their way from the other side in scattershot amber.And oh bloody hell, the fucking hair.He’d thought it was Fen’s face: perfectly proportioned, perfectly angled, perfectly exquisite.He’d thought it was Fen’s body: deliberately sculpted and honed, and all the more beautiful for the intrigue of the scarred map of self-inflicted sanity.He’d thought it was Fen’s hair: an outward symbol of inward bondage, and the bit of rebellion in the choppy fringe that hid his eyes, but never well enough.He’d thought it was the way Fen moved and glared and spoke and sneered.He’d thought it was the way Fen snarled and spat and fought and came this close to actually winning.And it was.It was all of those things.Except all of those things Malick could have walked away from.And yet somehow, he couldn’t walk away from Fen [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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