heartstringss
🔻 vive la résistance 🔻
Over two dozen individual eyeballs sat on marble plinths throughout the room, each one fixed and staring creepily at them. Arlo absorbed the skepticalness inside the stare of all those eyeballs… and though the inhuman quality of some did, quite frankly, make their skin crawl, they didn’t turn away. Instead, they stared blankly right on back.
Truth be told, they’d gotten used to being stared at. Everywhere they went they collected stares because they were an outsider. They couldn’t go anywhere without being balked at, not the public bathhouses, not the markets… Suppose they just had that sort of look about them: the look of someone whom society deemed uncivilized; that because they were nomadic they must have nothing useful to contribute, no valuable coin or tradeable knowledge, only scraps that they could barter. Nothing to do but beg, steal, loiter, cheat, or vandalize... It wasn’t true, of course. They were plenty strong and capable enough to work if they desired, not that that mattered considering they didn’t [desire to work, that is]. People’s minds were small, perhaps arguably smaller in Asiria due to the fact the borders had been closed so gods’ damn long.
For what it’s worth, Arlo fortunately was not small minded. (Perhaps that’s why their head was still miraculously whole and solid, despite this titan so annoyedly insisting that it should have melted.) They’d wandered the soil of this dying planet for what felt like centuries and never had they shied away from horror. The experiences they’d had since meeting the titan were unfathomable, their Fate and purposes uncertain… but they’d had plenty of odd experiences in the waking world before. For all they knew they could have still been dreaming.
“I know Delphine,” they answer shortly, biting their tongue rather than arguing with the woman since she clearly thought that they were stupid. But that lifetime of the princess had been over centuries ago, by now the royal line was long irrelevant and whatever came of Delphine’s child was no more than rumors passed through generations. (There was no record to show if the child had survived themselves; they’d simply disappeared to the timeline and become a ghost. It could be anyone, their mother told them. The royal line could always rise again.)
Being told that Delphine had nothing to do with them felt like it should have been an insult somehow. (Were all Asirians not meant to feel intricately connected to the royals? Ah yes, they were supposed to wish they could rewrite history and go back to the time the planet had “respectable” leaders.) Quite frankly, Arlo didn’t care the slightest what had become of the royal lineage all those years before. How could it possibly be good for one family, one person to have all that power? …Yet they had also just felt Delphine’s heartbeat in their own chest mere minutes ago due to one of this very same titan’s strange memory timelapse-like illusions. Had their souls not been entwined right then? Were her feelings not their own?
“He tried to kill Delphine,” Arlo remembered, speaking once again of Soren. “In the fortress. He tried to turn her against you first, though. You were her mentor. He said you led her astray.”
It didn’t matter what they remembered of the visions or what questions they still had–the titan’s mind was clearly elsewhere. She was so frazzled that for all they knew she might not have even heard them. Arlo wanted to understand, they really did… at the very least because there seemed to be no other option. Regardless of relevance, they were stuck in this place–they couldn’t will themselves away; there was no door or exit lest it be controlled by something else. This could have been a dream but all the same it made them oddly curious.
It was that same morbid curiosity that had them nearly touching things they shouldn’t. Their fingers danced along the edges of the plinth, not retracting all the while the titan rambled and she dawdled. They’d been afraid of her, once, when her form had been more intimidating and more otherworldly–less ridiculous–less human. Now that she was mostly human (even with still having otherworldly powers and some physical attributes, like the temple wings, that they couldn’t quite explain or fathom), they weren’t afraid but merely… well. Just curious.
When the woman swept across the room, suddenly towering over them, and slapped their hand away from the closest plinth of eyeball(s), Arlo took a sharp intake of breath. They’d noticed her eyes before, of course, but not experienced the true depth and gravity of their inhuman color this close before now.
The woman’s anger stuns them for only a moment. Within seconds, their whole demeanor shifts. They stand up taller, straightening their spine to reach and grasp the woman by her shoulders. (Assuming this un-human woman could even feel temperature and sensation like a normal person, Arlo’s metal left hand was likely a bit cold and biting on her skin. The other hand was warmer… in fact, its skin was tingling, turning almost feverishly hot the longer that they maintained contact with the titan's skin.) They leaned in until they were close enough their breath tickled the titan’s ear. Their voice took on a distinct quality that was not their own.
“I know your name,” they whispered gently. Teasing, almost. “Would you like to hear it?
Were they stupid? Crazy? Reckless? Brave?
As a matter of fact, they were.
Truth be told, they’d gotten used to being stared at. Everywhere they went they collected stares because they were an outsider. They couldn’t go anywhere without being balked at, not the public bathhouses, not the markets… Suppose they just had that sort of look about them: the look of someone whom society deemed uncivilized; that because they were nomadic they must have nothing useful to contribute, no valuable coin or tradeable knowledge, only scraps that they could barter. Nothing to do but beg, steal, loiter, cheat, or vandalize... It wasn’t true, of course. They were plenty strong and capable enough to work if they desired, not that that mattered considering they didn’t [desire to work, that is]. People’s minds were small, perhaps arguably smaller in Asiria due to the fact the borders had been closed so gods’ damn long.
For what it’s worth, Arlo fortunately was not small minded. (Perhaps that’s why their head was still miraculously whole and solid, despite this titan so annoyedly insisting that it should have melted.) They’d wandered the soil of this dying planet for what felt like centuries and never had they shied away from horror. The experiences they’d had since meeting the titan were unfathomable, their Fate and purposes uncertain… but they’d had plenty of odd experiences in the waking world before. For all they knew they could have still been dreaming.
“I know Delphine,” they answer shortly, biting their tongue rather than arguing with the woman since she clearly thought that they were stupid. But that lifetime of the princess had been over centuries ago, by now the royal line was long irrelevant and whatever came of Delphine’s child was no more than rumors passed through generations. (There was no record to show if the child had survived themselves; they’d simply disappeared to the timeline and become a ghost. It could be anyone, their mother told them. The royal line could always rise again.)
Being told that Delphine had nothing to do with them felt like it should have been an insult somehow. (Were all Asirians not meant to feel intricately connected to the royals? Ah yes, they were supposed to wish they could rewrite history and go back to the time the planet had “respectable” leaders.) Quite frankly, Arlo didn’t care the slightest what had become of the royal lineage all those years before. How could it possibly be good for one family, one person to have all that power? …Yet they had also just felt Delphine’s heartbeat in their own chest mere minutes ago due to one of this very same titan’s strange memory timelapse-like illusions. Had their souls not been entwined right then? Were her feelings not their own?
“He tried to kill Delphine,” Arlo remembered, speaking once again of Soren. “In the fortress. He tried to turn her against you first, though. You were her mentor. He said you led her astray.”
It didn’t matter what they remembered of the visions or what questions they still had–the titan’s mind was clearly elsewhere. She was so frazzled that for all they knew she might not have even heard them. Arlo wanted to understand, they really did… at the very least because there seemed to be no other option. Regardless of relevance, they were stuck in this place–they couldn’t will themselves away; there was no door or exit lest it be controlled by something else. This could have been a dream but all the same it made them oddly curious.
It was that same morbid curiosity that had them nearly touching things they shouldn’t. Their fingers danced along the edges of the plinth, not retracting all the while the titan rambled and she dawdled. They’d been afraid of her, once, when her form had been more intimidating and more otherworldly–less ridiculous–less human. Now that she was mostly human (even with still having otherworldly powers and some physical attributes, like the temple wings, that they couldn’t quite explain or fathom), they weren’t afraid but merely… well. Just curious.
When the woman swept across the room, suddenly towering over them, and slapped their hand away from the closest plinth of eyeball(s), Arlo took a sharp intake of breath. They’d noticed her eyes before, of course, but not experienced the true depth and gravity of their inhuman color this close before now.
The woman’s anger stuns them for only a moment. Within seconds, their whole demeanor shifts. They stand up taller, straightening their spine to reach and grasp the woman by her shoulders. (Assuming this un-human woman could even feel temperature and sensation like a normal person, Arlo’s metal left hand was likely a bit cold and biting on her skin. The other hand was warmer… in fact, its skin was tingling, turning almost feverishly hot the longer that they maintained contact with the titan's skin.) They leaned in until they were close enough their breath tickled the titan’s ear. Their voice took on a distinct quality that was not their own.
“I know your name,” they whispered gently. Teasing, almost. “Would you like to hear it?
Were they stupid? Crazy? Reckless? Brave?
“...B̴̡̢̘̤͓͎͎̗̔̍ŗ̴̡̨̡̹͉͕͔̻͒͂͆͋o̸͈͖̮̘̼͚̎̈̕͝ǹ̶̢͖͍̱̞̃͋̏͑́̚ẗ̷̢̧̬͎̳̜͕̱́̽̆̆̿͘͝͝é̵̢̝͈͎̥͔͉̗̦̐͒͜.”
As a matter of fact, they were.
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