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running on two legs
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ritostime!! thank you so much for letting me play with zenos and your warrior of light!
Characters: Zenos viator Galvus, she/they Warrior of Light, Thancred Waters
Summary:
“What was that?” asks someone nearby. No doubt a scout. Cirno hears their boots and then the boots of their companion. She listens closely, closely. Her ears are up sharp on her head—as her parents used to say to her, tickling her with the warm fur of their big embrace of her bigger body, ‘like the horns of an excited little imp’. Her heart is hammering: she is indeed excited. Her ears twitch to catch everything they can, counting through it all just to be sure: two boots, then four. No more than that. Two scouts guarding this edge of the camp. Once Cirno gets past them, she can properly run.
The second scout says, “I didn’t hear anything.”
Cirno almost does sigh in her relief, but as soon as it fills her mouth, she knows it’ll gust like a gale. She’s learned things since she’s been here about the cold—about this kind of cold—and one of them is this: it is terribly hushed, and it is terribly loud. It’s altogether oppressive of sound, a phenomenon that dominates it: Nature’s great authority. Sound makes the air move; Cirno is so used to the softest fur of their ears tickling gently under all the world’s acoustics that it had startled them to first realize the stillness of the ice. It was deep in Coerthas that they began to notice it, but it didn’t become so true until they came to Garlemald.
Many things remained unreal until they came: at last she saw the way the wars she fought have touched the soil, the lives upon it, far-flung as they are—touched the hearts and the blood of the people, fed them from afar—like the pretty wolfsbane growing high upon the mountains where Cirno’s parents raised her. Once, when Cirno was still small, the flower was growing upstream from where they and their parents lived, and for a while, Cirno wasn’t allowed to so much as splash in the nearby creek. Their parents were afraid that the purple flowers might float down in the water and kill their little one. They would only let Cirno drink good water from a skin until the wolfsbane had been removed by qualified moogles. And war feels like that. War is just like that, Cirno realizes now: poison downstream. Killing thirsty people who live at the foot of the mountain, unable to even glimpse or be glimpsed by those living high above them.
Cirno’s ears jump atop their head. Behind them, glass breaks—too close behind them. ‘Too close!’ she thinks, in a flurry, and she whirls, with another flurry at her feet: she kicks up snow. But what she sees is Thancred, and in front of him, her own frantic breath as a thin fog. Thancred is breathing calmly. His fog is thinner, more like his smile. “Just a friend,” he says lightly, but not to her. The two scouts come stomping in close, and here at the edge of Camp Broken Glass, they see Thancred and Cirno now standing together. Thancred’s posture is relaxed, as if he hadn’t just crept up in unreasonable silence over the crackling ice, while Cirno’s tail is lashing around behind her like a bright red banner of war.
“Oh, pardon us!” says the Lalafellin scout, quicker and lighter on her feet than her Elezen companion. “Didn’t know the two of you would be coming this way…”
“In truth,” says Thancred, “neither did I.” He speaks lightly again. Cirno understands that it’s like a lightweight blade: much as he suggests otherwise to two unfamiliar comrades, Thancred is not here unguarded.
He glances at Cirno. Cirno looks away, to the left—the right—heavensward, to the dark colors dropping into night. “I gotta piss,” they explain at last.
The scouts look at each other. Thancred’s smile gets a little less thin, has a little more body to it, now. Cirno nods, decisive, still turning their face up toward the dusk. “Is that right?” Thancred asks.
“Yep.”
The Elezen, a Gridanian lancer, shifts in place. His boots disturb the ice. “Are the, ehm, facilities back at camp not to your, ehm, liking…ma’am…?”
Cirno’s nose twitches. They sniff quickly, a thoughtful gesture, yet considering the sky. “Well, I should’ve said piss and stuff.” They place their hands on their hips, postured gravely in command, a stance of leadership—or something. “Piss and stuff. You know?”
“Sorry?” says the Elezen, and then, when the Lalafell kicks his greave with her boot, he says again, “Sorry!”
“Oh, do forgive him,” the Lalafell says to Cirno, pivoting on her heel to give a short bow. “He’s just the worst.”
“Aww,” says Cirno. She waves her hand, languid about it. “It’s fine, it’s fine.” And so the two scouts march back to their posts, through the ice like broken glass, through Cirno’s easy lie. But Thancred remains, and now he and Cirno stand together silently—mostly silently. Cirno cannot help but shift from foot to foot, and the Camp’s namesake keeps up its crackling call. She glances at Thancred and then looks quickly away. She does that three times.
“I’m not asking,” says Thancred at last, lighter than the winter air—lighter even than the air would be in spring. Out of the corner of her eye, Cirno watches his words drift upward and away, that little mass of fog. It dissipates. Her face is hot with embarrassment, and a stray snowflake melts upon the red apple of her cheek. “You don’t need to tell me everything. You never do. And it works out, doesn’t it? Well, by some measure or another.”
“Pretty much,” Cirno mumbles.
“Then off with you.” Thancred tilts his head back and shuts his eyes in the light snowfall, which is only now descending in earnest. He’s still smiling. It’s smaller, but fuller. It’s real.
Cirno lifts their eyes to him, and then too do they lift their face. They really look at him. “Yeah?”
“Of course.” Now Thancred shifts his posture, leans over to clap Cirno on the shoulder, and turns away. “Nature calls. Right?”
He leaves more loudly than he came. So does Cirno. She runs.
—
The sparse wood doesn’t feel sparse. It feels like pitch. Thick, dark, a sealant—like to seal her in with it, she thinks, and her hair is standing up on end, but she keeps going. She brushes her hands over slender, rough tree trunks as she passes by them. None of the trunks are near enough to one another that it should feel like they’re closing in on her, but still that’s what she feels. The denseness of this place makes it hard to breathe. Cirno has to be conscious of it, deliberate about it, and by the gods, it is loud. The volume of her breath, beating into her own ears, makes her feel like an animal.
No, it’s worse than that. She feels like prey.
When Cirno had set out, they did so like a hunter—thinking that they were a hunter. That they were prepared for a hunt. What folly. What hubris! What shame, for unwitting prey to carry such confidence! Striding right into the trap—the maw!
The trees get thinner. Then they stop. Cirno nearly doesn’t notice it for how sunken into the black her eyes have become. It has claimed her—but not utterly. She sees it—almost is blinded by the white of it—just in time. But she doesn’t leave the heavy black—not yet.
She hears something.
At first, Cirno thinks it is their own breath, so resounding and animal is it. Never does it cross their mind that it might be a bear nor any beast that’s not like them—so their initial thought is that it could only be them. They stop breathing, then. They hold their breath without even gulping in more of the shock-cold air in advance. They just stop. And yet do they hear it.
The breathing of the beast amid the black is thunderous, like theirs. It’s an interloper in this skinny wood, like theirs. It is alone; it is overwhelmed, overwhelming; it’s ragged with desire unfulfilled, and malnourished for it. It’s the breath of prey—like theirs. It’s the breath of a predator, misplaced, an open mouth—like theirs. ‘I know you,’ thinks Cirno. ‘Gods, I know it.’ Breathing across the blank white stage of snow is the beast like Cirno: the profane prince of this place.
Now comes the scent of him. He’s too mired in the black right now for Cirno to see him; he’s shadowed, sheltered, by his birthright, these rough pines. Zenos smells unlike he used to: once—more than once—he did smell like a prince. The sort of scent Cirno had imagined when their parents told them faerie tales. There was the tang of blood and his armor; there was leather and linen. There was the virile sweat of the victorious. There was perfume. The prince’s perfume was like weather: cloud cover through which the sun yet broke. Now Cirno smells only the sun.
He smells her too. She knows he does. She smells like an animal—they smell like the same animal, their narrow shared genus, of which there are only they two. Iron, linen, leather. Sweat. Want. Yet he doesn’t come out to greet her nor bite her. ‘Where are you?’ she wants to ask. But what animal calls after another with words? They must court according to the snowy wood around them.
It’s Zenos who casts this place as one of the dance halls in his family’s palace. Each time Cirno takes two steps, they hear another in response: the warriors are dancing. As if the prince were sweeping through a courtly ball, and Cirno of nobility enough to share the dance, they step in time. One-two-crunch-three. One-two-crunch-three. ‘Just walk to me,’ they think. They cast their eyes about the clearing, their posture loose and sloppy. ‘Walk to me; just walk to me.’ Is it naivete that has them thinking it at all? What faith perverted has them standing this way, soft joints and jugular overexposed? Well, whatever else the faith they bear, it’s misplaced. Warping the grandeur as with his own empire, ending the courtly step-by-step, Zenos comes out of the trees like cannon fire, and he topples Cirno like a civilian’s house.
Cirno starts to shriek at him before he presses down on their throat with the heel of his palm. He isn’t using words, either. He’s just breathing like a steam train, engulfing Cirno with it, as if he is urged on by a furnace inside him and a mighty bellows stoking him hot as heat can get. Fire-bellied, he’s pushed faster and further by red-and-orange—Cirno’s hair. His slaver drips onto it, so close and so open is his mouth. Cirno turns their face as much as they are able, squirming beneath Zenos’ great, hot hands, but now his saliva just runs over their cheek. They squeeze their eyes shut, though not so tightly as their throat has been closed beneath the prince’s palm. ‘Is he gonna eat me?’ Cirno wonders wildly, because Zenos is acting like a thing starved. And with that wretched thought, they make the first sound they have made since Zenos silenced the beginning of their scream. ‘Like a wolf!’ they insist to themself right away, hating how red they know their cheeks become in that same instant. ‘I’m howling like a wolf!’—and not a moaning paramour. Insisting it doesn’t make that true, and they think more urgently instead: ‘Oh, gods, he’s going to bite me!’
He does bite her. She has no time to avoid it. She doesn’t—just because she knows that he is going to do it doesn’t mean she can stop it—or she would! And Zenos does bite her, with his over-large mouth overshadowing her face, coming down upon her cheek like she’s an apple in an orchard. The reply out of her throat is as animal as his own—is he growling at her cheek? He is! Cirno can feel the rumble of his voice first at the apple he bites, and then through the structure of her skull, bearing from his breast into the tremor of her jaw. She grabs at his hair, taking one handful by the root and then another, wrenching at his head—any neck not so thick might have broken for her strength and urgency. Zenos doesn’t break. His neck cracks a little when his face is jerked away from hers, and, as if it feels good—because it feels good—he laughs.
His first licks of laughter, like little tongues of flame in a stove newly stoked, eke out of his throat, and if Cirno could deny in her mind that she herself sounded like a moaning paramour, she cannot even attempt the denial when listening to Zenos. It’s all involuntary, and honest for it: pure pleasure. Delight like firelight and fire’s warmth. It is such a forthright joy that to witness it brings Cirno to blush. “Why did you have to—” She pulls her hands out of his hair to cover her own cheeks, which glow—as if by the belly of his stove—between her splayed fingers. “I didn’t come here for this!”
Again like a furnace, one sputtering in frost, Zenos laughs. He leans back from her, letting her sit where she is in the snow, and himself reclining. His legs are stretched out in front of himself, now, and he tips back his head to look at Cirno in such a way that he peers over the angle of his own shoulder. It makes him look coy, more than he really is. “Then why did you come?” he asks.
Through the haze of her own heat, Cirno peers at his face. Cupping their own cheeks bears unto their hands a better understanding of what it’s been like to touch Zenos. The sputter of his furnace—he is not hot. He is warm where he ought to be hottest. He is driven by exceptional heat and it yet leaves his skin cold, so deficient in warmth is he. He needs more of it, or he will not last. Whatever he wants here, tumbling, tussling out in the snow—he should want to be warmer, first and foremost.
Planted on their behind, and propped up on their palms, with their knees spread in front of them without guile, Cirno feels less like a beast but not so much like themself—more like an ungainly child. Zenos, by comparison, is a golden heap of grace. Most men would call for comparisons upon a lion: the imperious recline, crossed ankles, the richness of his blond pelt, a color which is so warm it has no choice but to resemble blood beating in a heated breast despite bearing no red. Cirno would not call him a lion. A haystack, they would say. Heavy—dense—the sheaves of him in hues as honey sown unto his homeland—and then sheared away. A place—she would say this in her own words if she were made to, and for a blessing she is not—as she drags her sleeve across her face to clear away his slaver—if she is a vagabond, errant in the fields, he is like a haystack: he is a place that lures her in for bed. A place to stop—to crawl inside in pursuit of insular heat.
They crawl toward him after all. Cirno hefts themself onto their knees, watching Zenos all the while, who watches them in turn, of course. Every muscle Cirno moves is in anticipation of Zenos’ own body. They wait to see what he will do. He doesn’t twitch. He blinks like he might blink if he were just sitting idly. All he’s doing, reclined in their ruined patch of snow, is watching Cirno. He doesn’t move at all even as Cirno reaches him, even as they take one wet hand out of the snow to touch his knee, nor when Cirno crawls along his outstretched legs like a wildcat skulking along the big branches of a sturdy tree. It’s not until Cirno has made it all the way into his lap, with one hand reaching toward his chest, that Zenos speaks. “For this?” he asks. “Is this why you have come to me this night? To touch me.”
“No,” says Cirno. Whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter to her; she says it quickly and firmly. She presses her palm to Zenos’ chest. She slinks in closer. She comes in like she’s going to nose at his throat. She can’t see his face then: who knows whether he has started smiling, or whether his face reflects the thinness of his purr. ‘He doesn’t get it,’ Cirno thinks, and it frustrates them—but they don’t get it either. They just push their face in closer toward his neck. Then they stop. They say, with their voice touching Zenos’ throat like a little lick, “You reek.”
They still cannot see his face, but they can hear him laugh. More than anything—more than anything—they can hear it. “Like you,” he says.
“No! Not like—” She jerks back—still balanced on his lap, she pulls her face back from his neck to look into his own. “Not like me. You’ve been sleeping out here.”
Zenos looks down the length of his nose at Cirno’s smaller face. His eyes are moving over her features, restless, more restless than his posture as he lets her sit upon him. He looks like a man with his head tipped back, counting stars. Perhaps he is trying to number her freckles—or her words—or each heart beat spent here together. The sum of the seconds across his life which have brought him joy. The amount of blood pumping through his body which has actually been meaningful. “Have I?” he asks, and like a sunrise, it’s slow and sudden both at once.
The bruises underneath his eyes. His lips like chalk, pale and dry. If he hasn’t been sleeping, he has only sat, or wandered. He has only spent the hours awake with himself. ‘There’s more,’ Cirno wants to tell him, but they don’t know what more to tell him—how to articulate it, never mind convince him. There’s more than just… Cirno shakes their head quickly, with such force that it makes them see stars, and then they open their eyes to peer through those stars, again at Zenos. They bring up their other hand, and now both of their palms are flat against Zenos’ chest. Their hands rise and fall with his breathing, and they lower their eyes to watch it. “Can’t you be…”
Zenos continues to breathe. He waits for Cirno to finish their sentence. But Cirno’s voice has fallen away, fallen back like an army outnumbered, fallen short like a failure. The silence of the snowy wood comes back. It could crush them both.
At last Zenos usurps it. “I don’t know,” he says. “Can I?”
Cirno looks at his face again.
“Can I?” he asks once more, quiet. His brow furrows a tick. He’s asking for an answer. “What is it that you wish for me to be?”
‘Shouldn’t have said it,’ Cirno thinks to themself. Their lips draw into a tight, white line, and their eyes are wide; their face is as if they are witnessing an accident. ‘Shouldn’t have said it. Don’t know what else to say.’ It was an ill-advised advancement, a catastrophe of strategy. There is nowhere to go from here.
“What is it?” Zenos asks. It’s beginning to snow. If they weren’t pressed to each other in this little clearing, the trees would catch the snowflakes: the snow is puffy, very light, with clumping flakes that find and cling to one another in the air. But without the shelter of the wood, Cirno watches the snowflakes catch on Zenos’ fair eyelashes. “Is it a thing that I can be?”
Cirno shakes their head again, and it’s more of an answer than they mean for it to be. It looks like no, of course. But what they mean is: ‘I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t know!’ and it’s clear to them that there can be no more of this language. They stare at their hands over Zenos’ chest before raising their face and pushing in close to kiss him.
It occurs to them, but halfway: ‘He’ll think this is…’ And they were right. Zenos thinks that Cirno wants to bite him. He starts to bite back—not unreasonably, Cirno concedes—so they take a fistful of his hair again and wrench his head back as far as he will allow. “Stop,” they tell him, a command like he’s a pupil, unruly. “Not like that. Like—” They kiss him again, still grasping his hair by the root, and he agrees to learn the lesson. Cirno goads him into the first proper kisses of his life, even as his lips are like cold chalk against theirs, even as his tongue disagrees with the premise of accommodating anybody else’s. ‘Easier than I thought,’ muses Cirno, grasping into his hair with their other hand too. It’s easy to hold his head and chide him; it’s easy to push him down into the snow so that he’s flat on his back while they straddle over him. It’s easy to kiss him.
It could be too easy. ‘Yeah,’ Cirno reazlies, with alarm. ‘You could be this.’ He’s holding onto her body now. He’s touching her, now, with his broad hands over half her body in just one sweep. He’s letting her press him down into the snow. He’d let her do more than that if she tried. She kisses over his face, with her mouth already sore, and one of her hands smooths around to grasp instead into the hair just above his forehead. She holds him there, holds his head down that way. He’d let her do more. She pulls her left hand back to herself and then slips it down to her own hip to retrieve a knife she keeps there. He’d let her do more. She puts her knife up to his neck and looks all over his face: his eyes like good weather, his mouth wet and made redder by hers. He’d let her do more.
“Like this?” he asks. He’s smiling—wan, like a departing moon, but he is smiling.
Cirno practically flings aside their dagger, as if it has burned them. They rip their hand away from Zenos’ hair, too, as if he has burned them. They skitter back—away from his body—away—they skitter through the snow like they are trying to save their own life. He’s still lying there when Cirno fumbles to stand upright, and even as they back away step by shaky step, he’s slow to sit up. Snow falls away from him as he does. He looks like a man coming out of a dream, while he turns his head toward her.
“Not,” she says, short of breath—from kissing him, from not killing him— “Not like this.” She stands up, though it feels like a feat to do so. Watching still, Zenos deliberates, and then he stands as well. He stands, slow, sudden, like a sunrise.
His steps crunch through the snow. They’re slower, far less sudden, and punctuated: the coming-out of stars at night. He walks not toward Cirno but toward the knife she’d tossed aside, and then stoops the long stoop that he might pick it up. He lifts it and dusts the snow from gleaming of it with his fingers. He looks at his reflection in the flat of its blade. “Not so?” he asks, soft. Very softly. Holding the little blade, he’s the picture of a hunter—the perfect picture. It might be barely longer than one of his fingers, if that, but he’s the picture of a man who could wield it against any animal. Cirno sees all this not through the eyes of a fellow hunter. When she set out tonight—stupid! The folly, the hubris—she presumed she was ready for a hunt! But the fur on her tail stands out in a terrified puff, and the hair on the back of her neck stands up from her flesh, for fear—for the affection it just felt beneath his hunter’s hand.
If Cirno could explain it, they would. They’d at least try. If they knew to do at least this much, they would call to Zenos now: ‘You make me run!’ Whenever they see him, it’s true. Toward him, away—it doesn’t matter so long as they feel all the motion, the sweat, the hammering heart, and the salty taste of that line between triumph and true loss. Always, always, he sets them to running. But they cannot think of it as anything but—they can only conclude that they are prey. They see Zenos, tall—wilting—mottled in the face for lack of meat and mead—broad and waning both at once—holding the knife cast aside, Cirno sees him. He looks hungry. He looks like he needs to hunt. So Cirno turns from him and kicks up snow, like a million little crystals flung back from their heel, glittering more bright, more briefly, than frightened eyes. Cirno runs, and fast. They run away. They run alone.
Camp Broken Glass makes shattering sounds as soon as Cirno comes barreling unto its border. She kicks through the snow not like a runner, but like a stone that’s been thrown to skip across still water. She breathes not like the Warrior of Light, but like a body full of nutrients for a hungry man holding a knife.
Thancred has been waiting for her, decent enough to leave her on her own but still having paced this place since she had left. “How was it?” he asks, casual in the way he’s good at being. He’s leaning against the wall of one of the buildings toward the edge of camp, peeling something to eat with a knife. It gleams the same but looks nothing in his hand like the knife Zenos was left holding. Thancred holds it unlike any hunter.
So Cirno looks at him but doesn’t see him: she just sees more prey. She looks wildly around herself, and all through the camp, it’s the same—more prey. She is gulping in air like it will save her life, and it huffs back out of her, pure white in the breeze like the billowing dress of a bride. The sweat that Zenos had licked off her face is returned, and freezing at her temples. It clings, even, to her eyelashes. She looks back to whence she came. He doesn’t come crashing after. He doesn’t come.
How was it? Nature? Its call? This secret of secrets which Cirno cannot explain? The run through the woods—the instinct Zenos always spurs in her? The run? She stares at the sloppy trail of her own footprints in the snow, leading back here from the wood. How was it?
“Best of my life,” they gasp.
Characters: Zenos viator Galvus, she/they Warrior of Light, Thancred Waters
Summary:
They bring up their other hand, and now both of their palms are flat against Zenos’ chest. Their hands rise and fall with his breathing, and they lower their eyes to watch it. “Can’t you be…”
Zenos continues to breathe. He waits for Cirno to finish their sentence. But Cirno’s voice has fallen away, fallen back like an army outnumbered, fallen short like a failure. The silence of the snowy wood comes back. It could crush them both.
At last Zenos usurps it. “I don’t know,” he says. “Can I?”
running on two legs
“What was that?” asks someone nearby. No doubt a scout. Cirno hears their boots and then the boots of their companion. She listens closely, closely. Her ears are up sharp on her head—as her parents used to say to her, tickling her with the warm fur of their big embrace of her bigger body, ‘like the horns of an excited little imp’. Her heart is hammering: she is indeed excited. Her ears twitch to catch everything they can, counting through it all just to be sure: two boots, then four. No more than that. Two scouts guarding this edge of the camp. Once Cirno gets past them, she can properly run.
The second scout says, “I didn’t hear anything.”
Cirno almost does sigh in her relief, but as soon as it fills her mouth, she knows it’ll gust like a gale. She’s learned things since she’s been here about the cold—about this kind of cold—and one of them is this: it is terribly hushed, and it is terribly loud. It’s altogether oppressive of sound, a phenomenon that dominates it: Nature’s great authority. Sound makes the air move; Cirno is so used to the softest fur of their ears tickling gently under all the world’s acoustics that it had startled them to first realize the stillness of the ice. It was deep in Coerthas that they began to notice it, but it didn’t become so true until they came to Garlemald.
Many things remained unreal until they came: at last she saw the way the wars she fought have touched the soil, the lives upon it, far-flung as they are—touched the hearts and the blood of the people, fed them from afar—like the pretty wolfsbane growing high upon the mountains where Cirno’s parents raised her. Once, when Cirno was still small, the flower was growing upstream from where they and their parents lived, and for a while, Cirno wasn’t allowed to so much as splash in the nearby creek. Their parents were afraid that the purple flowers might float down in the water and kill their little one. They would only let Cirno drink good water from a skin until the wolfsbane had been removed by qualified moogles. And war feels like that. War is just like that, Cirno realizes now: poison downstream. Killing thirsty people who live at the foot of the mountain, unable to even glimpse or be glimpsed by those living high above them.
Cirno’s ears jump atop their head. Behind them, glass breaks—too close behind them. ‘Too close!’ she thinks, in a flurry, and she whirls, with another flurry at her feet: she kicks up snow. But what she sees is Thancred, and in front of him, her own frantic breath as a thin fog. Thancred is breathing calmly. His fog is thinner, more like his smile. “Just a friend,” he says lightly, but not to her. The two scouts come stomping in close, and here at the edge of Camp Broken Glass, they see Thancred and Cirno now standing together. Thancred’s posture is relaxed, as if he hadn’t just crept up in unreasonable silence over the crackling ice, while Cirno’s tail is lashing around behind her like a bright red banner of war.
“Oh, pardon us!” says the Lalafellin scout, quicker and lighter on her feet than her Elezen companion. “Didn’t know the two of you would be coming this way…”
“In truth,” says Thancred, “neither did I.” He speaks lightly again. Cirno understands that it’s like a lightweight blade: much as he suggests otherwise to two unfamiliar comrades, Thancred is not here unguarded.
He glances at Cirno. Cirno looks away, to the left—the right—heavensward, to the dark colors dropping into night. “I gotta piss,” they explain at last.
The scouts look at each other. Thancred’s smile gets a little less thin, has a little more body to it, now. Cirno nods, decisive, still turning their face up toward the dusk. “Is that right?” Thancred asks.
“Yep.”
The Elezen, a Gridanian lancer, shifts in place. His boots disturb the ice. “Are the, ehm, facilities back at camp not to your, ehm, liking…ma’am…?”
Cirno’s nose twitches. They sniff quickly, a thoughtful gesture, yet considering the sky. “Well, I should’ve said piss and stuff.” They place their hands on their hips, postured gravely in command, a stance of leadership—or something. “Piss and stuff. You know?”
“Sorry?” says the Elezen, and then, when the Lalafell kicks his greave with her boot, he says again, “Sorry!”
“Oh, do forgive him,” the Lalafell says to Cirno, pivoting on her heel to give a short bow. “He’s just the worst.”
“Aww,” says Cirno. She waves her hand, languid about it. “It’s fine, it’s fine.” And so the two scouts march back to their posts, through the ice like broken glass, through Cirno’s easy lie. But Thancred remains, and now he and Cirno stand together silently—mostly silently. Cirno cannot help but shift from foot to foot, and the Camp’s namesake keeps up its crackling call. She glances at Thancred and then looks quickly away. She does that three times.
“I’m not asking,” says Thancred at last, lighter than the winter air—lighter even than the air would be in spring. Out of the corner of her eye, Cirno watches his words drift upward and away, that little mass of fog. It dissipates. Her face is hot with embarrassment, and a stray snowflake melts upon the red apple of her cheek. “You don’t need to tell me everything. You never do. And it works out, doesn’t it? Well, by some measure or another.”
“Pretty much,” Cirno mumbles.
“Then off with you.” Thancred tilts his head back and shuts his eyes in the light snowfall, which is only now descending in earnest. He’s still smiling. It’s smaller, but fuller. It’s real.
Cirno lifts their eyes to him, and then too do they lift their face. They really look at him. “Yeah?”
“Of course.” Now Thancred shifts his posture, leans over to clap Cirno on the shoulder, and turns away. “Nature calls. Right?”
He leaves more loudly than he came. So does Cirno. She runs.
—
The sparse wood doesn’t feel sparse. It feels like pitch. Thick, dark, a sealant—like to seal her in with it, she thinks, and her hair is standing up on end, but she keeps going. She brushes her hands over slender, rough tree trunks as she passes by them. None of the trunks are near enough to one another that it should feel like they’re closing in on her, but still that’s what she feels. The denseness of this place makes it hard to breathe. Cirno has to be conscious of it, deliberate about it, and by the gods, it is loud. The volume of her breath, beating into her own ears, makes her feel like an animal.
No, it’s worse than that. She feels like prey.
When Cirno had set out, they did so like a hunter—thinking that they were a hunter. That they were prepared for a hunt. What folly. What hubris! What shame, for unwitting prey to carry such confidence! Striding right into the trap—the maw!
The trees get thinner. Then they stop. Cirno nearly doesn’t notice it for how sunken into the black her eyes have become. It has claimed her—but not utterly. She sees it—almost is blinded by the white of it—just in time. But she doesn’t leave the heavy black—not yet.
She hears something.
At first, Cirno thinks it is their own breath, so resounding and animal is it. Never does it cross their mind that it might be a bear nor any beast that’s not like them—so their initial thought is that it could only be them. They stop breathing, then. They hold their breath without even gulping in more of the shock-cold air in advance. They just stop. And yet do they hear it.
The breathing of the beast amid the black is thunderous, like theirs. It’s an interloper in this skinny wood, like theirs. It is alone; it is overwhelmed, overwhelming; it’s ragged with desire unfulfilled, and malnourished for it. It’s the breath of prey—like theirs. It’s the breath of a predator, misplaced, an open mouth—like theirs. ‘I know you,’ thinks Cirno. ‘Gods, I know it.’ Breathing across the blank white stage of snow is the beast like Cirno: the profane prince of this place.
Now comes the scent of him. He’s too mired in the black right now for Cirno to see him; he’s shadowed, sheltered, by his birthright, these rough pines. Zenos smells unlike he used to: once—more than once—he did smell like a prince. The sort of scent Cirno had imagined when their parents told them faerie tales. There was the tang of blood and his armor; there was leather and linen. There was the virile sweat of the victorious. There was perfume. The prince’s perfume was like weather: cloud cover through which the sun yet broke. Now Cirno smells only the sun.
He smells her too. She knows he does. She smells like an animal—they smell like the same animal, their narrow shared genus, of which there are only they two. Iron, linen, leather. Sweat. Want. Yet he doesn’t come out to greet her nor bite her. ‘Where are you?’ she wants to ask. But what animal calls after another with words? They must court according to the snowy wood around them.
It’s Zenos who casts this place as one of the dance halls in his family’s palace. Each time Cirno takes two steps, they hear another in response: the warriors are dancing. As if the prince were sweeping through a courtly ball, and Cirno of nobility enough to share the dance, they step in time. One-two-crunch-three. One-two-crunch-three. ‘Just walk to me,’ they think. They cast their eyes about the clearing, their posture loose and sloppy. ‘Walk to me; just walk to me.’ Is it naivete that has them thinking it at all? What faith perverted has them standing this way, soft joints and jugular overexposed? Well, whatever else the faith they bear, it’s misplaced. Warping the grandeur as with his own empire, ending the courtly step-by-step, Zenos comes out of the trees like cannon fire, and he topples Cirno like a civilian’s house.
Cirno starts to shriek at him before he presses down on their throat with the heel of his palm. He isn’t using words, either. He’s just breathing like a steam train, engulfing Cirno with it, as if he is urged on by a furnace inside him and a mighty bellows stoking him hot as heat can get. Fire-bellied, he’s pushed faster and further by red-and-orange—Cirno’s hair. His slaver drips onto it, so close and so open is his mouth. Cirno turns their face as much as they are able, squirming beneath Zenos’ great, hot hands, but now his saliva just runs over their cheek. They squeeze their eyes shut, though not so tightly as their throat has been closed beneath the prince’s palm. ‘Is he gonna eat me?’ Cirno wonders wildly, because Zenos is acting like a thing starved. And with that wretched thought, they make the first sound they have made since Zenos silenced the beginning of their scream. ‘Like a wolf!’ they insist to themself right away, hating how red they know their cheeks become in that same instant. ‘I’m howling like a wolf!’—and not a moaning paramour. Insisting it doesn’t make that true, and they think more urgently instead: ‘Oh, gods, he’s going to bite me!’
He does bite her. She has no time to avoid it. She doesn’t—just because she knows that he is going to do it doesn’t mean she can stop it—or she would! And Zenos does bite her, with his over-large mouth overshadowing her face, coming down upon her cheek like she’s an apple in an orchard. The reply out of her throat is as animal as his own—is he growling at her cheek? He is! Cirno can feel the rumble of his voice first at the apple he bites, and then through the structure of her skull, bearing from his breast into the tremor of her jaw. She grabs at his hair, taking one handful by the root and then another, wrenching at his head—any neck not so thick might have broken for her strength and urgency. Zenos doesn’t break. His neck cracks a little when his face is jerked away from hers, and, as if it feels good—because it feels good—he laughs.
His first licks of laughter, like little tongues of flame in a stove newly stoked, eke out of his throat, and if Cirno could deny in her mind that she herself sounded like a moaning paramour, she cannot even attempt the denial when listening to Zenos. It’s all involuntary, and honest for it: pure pleasure. Delight like firelight and fire’s warmth. It is such a forthright joy that to witness it brings Cirno to blush. “Why did you have to—” She pulls her hands out of his hair to cover her own cheeks, which glow—as if by the belly of his stove—between her splayed fingers. “I didn’t come here for this!”
Again like a furnace, one sputtering in frost, Zenos laughs. He leans back from her, letting her sit where she is in the snow, and himself reclining. His legs are stretched out in front of himself, now, and he tips back his head to look at Cirno in such a way that he peers over the angle of his own shoulder. It makes him look coy, more than he really is. “Then why did you come?” he asks.
Through the haze of her own heat, Cirno peers at his face. Cupping their own cheeks bears unto their hands a better understanding of what it’s been like to touch Zenos. The sputter of his furnace—he is not hot. He is warm where he ought to be hottest. He is driven by exceptional heat and it yet leaves his skin cold, so deficient in warmth is he. He needs more of it, or he will not last. Whatever he wants here, tumbling, tussling out in the snow—he should want to be warmer, first and foremost.
Planted on their behind, and propped up on their palms, with their knees spread in front of them without guile, Cirno feels less like a beast but not so much like themself—more like an ungainly child. Zenos, by comparison, is a golden heap of grace. Most men would call for comparisons upon a lion: the imperious recline, crossed ankles, the richness of his blond pelt, a color which is so warm it has no choice but to resemble blood beating in a heated breast despite bearing no red. Cirno would not call him a lion. A haystack, they would say. Heavy—dense—the sheaves of him in hues as honey sown unto his homeland—and then sheared away. A place—she would say this in her own words if she were made to, and for a blessing she is not—as she drags her sleeve across her face to clear away his slaver—if she is a vagabond, errant in the fields, he is like a haystack: he is a place that lures her in for bed. A place to stop—to crawl inside in pursuit of insular heat.
They crawl toward him after all. Cirno hefts themself onto their knees, watching Zenos all the while, who watches them in turn, of course. Every muscle Cirno moves is in anticipation of Zenos’ own body. They wait to see what he will do. He doesn’t twitch. He blinks like he might blink if he were just sitting idly. All he’s doing, reclined in their ruined patch of snow, is watching Cirno. He doesn’t move at all even as Cirno reaches him, even as they take one wet hand out of the snow to touch his knee, nor when Cirno crawls along his outstretched legs like a wildcat skulking along the big branches of a sturdy tree. It’s not until Cirno has made it all the way into his lap, with one hand reaching toward his chest, that Zenos speaks. “For this?” he asks. “Is this why you have come to me this night? To touch me.”
“No,” says Cirno. Whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter to her; she says it quickly and firmly. She presses her palm to Zenos’ chest. She slinks in closer. She comes in like she’s going to nose at his throat. She can’t see his face then: who knows whether he has started smiling, or whether his face reflects the thinness of his purr. ‘He doesn’t get it,’ Cirno thinks, and it frustrates them—but they don’t get it either. They just push their face in closer toward his neck. Then they stop. They say, with their voice touching Zenos’ throat like a little lick, “You reek.”
They still cannot see his face, but they can hear him laugh. More than anything—more than anything—they can hear it. “Like you,” he says.
“No! Not like—” She jerks back—still balanced on his lap, she pulls her face back from his neck to look into his own. “Not like me. You’ve been sleeping out here.”
Zenos looks down the length of his nose at Cirno’s smaller face. His eyes are moving over her features, restless, more restless than his posture as he lets her sit upon him. He looks like a man with his head tipped back, counting stars. Perhaps he is trying to number her freckles—or her words—or each heart beat spent here together. The sum of the seconds across his life which have brought him joy. The amount of blood pumping through his body which has actually been meaningful. “Have I?” he asks, and like a sunrise, it’s slow and sudden both at once.
The bruises underneath his eyes. His lips like chalk, pale and dry. If he hasn’t been sleeping, he has only sat, or wandered. He has only spent the hours awake with himself. ‘There’s more,’ Cirno wants to tell him, but they don’t know what more to tell him—how to articulate it, never mind convince him. There’s more than just… Cirno shakes their head quickly, with such force that it makes them see stars, and then they open their eyes to peer through those stars, again at Zenos. They bring up their other hand, and now both of their palms are flat against Zenos’ chest. Their hands rise and fall with his breathing, and they lower their eyes to watch it. “Can’t you be…”
Zenos continues to breathe. He waits for Cirno to finish their sentence. But Cirno’s voice has fallen away, fallen back like an army outnumbered, fallen short like a failure. The silence of the snowy wood comes back. It could crush them both.
At last Zenos usurps it. “I don’t know,” he says. “Can I?”
Cirno looks at his face again.
“Can I?” he asks once more, quiet. His brow furrows a tick. He’s asking for an answer. “What is it that you wish for me to be?”
‘Shouldn’t have said it,’ Cirno thinks to themself. Their lips draw into a tight, white line, and their eyes are wide; their face is as if they are witnessing an accident. ‘Shouldn’t have said it. Don’t know what else to say.’ It was an ill-advised advancement, a catastrophe of strategy. There is nowhere to go from here.
“What is it?” Zenos asks. It’s beginning to snow. If they weren’t pressed to each other in this little clearing, the trees would catch the snowflakes: the snow is puffy, very light, with clumping flakes that find and cling to one another in the air. But without the shelter of the wood, Cirno watches the snowflakes catch on Zenos’ fair eyelashes. “Is it a thing that I can be?”
Cirno shakes their head again, and it’s more of an answer than they mean for it to be. It looks like no, of course. But what they mean is: ‘I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t know!’ and it’s clear to them that there can be no more of this language. They stare at their hands over Zenos’ chest before raising their face and pushing in close to kiss him.
It occurs to them, but halfway: ‘He’ll think this is…’ And they were right. Zenos thinks that Cirno wants to bite him. He starts to bite back—not unreasonably, Cirno concedes—so they take a fistful of his hair again and wrench his head back as far as he will allow. “Stop,” they tell him, a command like he’s a pupil, unruly. “Not like that. Like—” They kiss him again, still grasping his hair by the root, and he agrees to learn the lesson. Cirno goads him into the first proper kisses of his life, even as his lips are like cold chalk against theirs, even as his tongue disagrees with the premise of accommodating anybody else’s. ‘Easier than I thought,’ muses Cirno, grasping into his hair with their other hand too. It’s easy to hold his head and chide him; it’s easy to push him down into the snow so that he’s flat on his back while they straddle over him. It’s easy to kiss him.
It could be too easy. ‘Yeah,’ Cirno reazlies, with alarm. ‘You could be this.’ He’s holding onto her body now. He’s touching her, now, with his broad hands over half her body in just one sweep. He’s letting her press him down into the snow. He’d let her do more than that if she tried. She kisses over his face, with her mouth already sore, and one of her hands smooths around to grasp instead into the hair just above his forehead. She holds him there, holds his head down that way. He’d let her do more. She pulls her left hand back to herself and then slips it down to her own hip to retrieve a knife she keeps there. He’d let her do more. She puts her knife up to his neck and looks all over his face: his eyes like good weather, his mouth wet and made redder by hers. He’d let her do more.
“Like this?” he asks. He’s smiling—wan, like a departing moon, but he is smiling.
Cirno practically flings aside their dagger, as if it has burned them. They rip their hand away from Zenos’ hair, too, as if he has burned them. They skitter back—away from his body—away—they skitter through the snow like they are trying to save their own life. He’s still lying there when Cirno fumbles to stand upright, and even as they back away step by shaky step, he’s slow to sit up. Snow falls away from him as he does. He looks like a man coming out of a dream, while he turns his head toward her.
“Not,” she says, short of breath—from kissing him, from not killing him— “Not like this.” She stands up, though it feels like a feat to do so. Watching still, Zenos deliberates, and then he stands as well. He stands, slow, sudden, like a sunrise.
His steps crunch through the snow. They’re slower, far less sudden, and punctuated: the coming-out of stars at night. He walks not toward Cirno but toward the knife she’d tossed aside, and then stoops the long stoop that he might pick it up. He lifts it and dusts the snow from gleaming of it with his fingers. He looks at his reflection in the flat of its blade. “Not so?” he asks, soft. Very softly. Holding the little blade, he’s the picture of a hunter—the perfect picture. It might be barely longer than one of his fingers, if that, but he’s the picture of a man who could wield it against any animal. Cirno sees all this not through the eyes of a fellow hunter. When she set out tonight—stupid! The folly, the hubris—she presumed she was ready for a hunt! But the fur on her tail stands out in a terrified puff, and the hair on the back of her neck stands up from her flesh, for fear—for the affection it just felt beneath his hunter’s hand.
If Cirno could explain it, they would. They’d at least try. If they knew to do at least this much, they would call to Zenos now: ‘You make me run!’ Whenever they see him, it’s true. Toward him, away—it doesn’t matter so long as they feel all the motion, the sweat, the hammering heart, and the salty taste of that line between triumph and true loss. Always, always, he sets them to running. But they cannot think of it as anything but—they can only conclude that they are prey. They see Zenos, tall—wilting—mottled in the face for lack of meat and mead—broad and waning both at once—holding the knife cast aside, Cirno sees him. He looks hungry. He looks like he needs to hunt. So Cirno turns from him and kicks up snow, like a million little crystals flung back from their heel, glittering more bright, more briefly, than frightened eyes. Cirno runs, and fast. They run away. They run alone.
Camp Broken Glass makes shattering sounds as soon as Cirno comes barreling unto its border. She kicks through the snow not like a runner, but like a stone that’s been thrown to skip across still water. She breathes not like the Warrior of Light, but like a body full of nutrients for a hungry man holding a knife.
Thancred has been waiting for her, decent enough to leave her on her own but still having paced this place since she had left. “How was it?” he asks, casual in the way he’s good at being. He’s leaning against the wall of one of the buildings toward the edge of camp, peeling something to eat with a knife. It gleams the same but looks nothing in his hand like the knife Zenos was left holding. Thancred holds it unlike any hunter.
So Cirno looks at him but doesn’t see him: she just sees more prey. She looks wildly around herself, and all through the camp, it’s the same—more prey. She is gulping in air like it will save her life, and it huffs back out of her, pure white in the breeze like the billowing dress of a bride. The sweat that Zenos had licked off her face is returned, and freezing at her temples. It clings, even, to her eyelashes. She looks back to whence she came. He doesn’t come crashing after. He doesn’t come.
How was it? Nature? Its call? This secret of secrets which Cirno cannot explain? The run through the woods—the instinct Zenos always spurs in her? The run? She stares at the sloppy trail of her own footprints in the snow, leading back here from the wood. How was it?
“Best of my life,” they gasp.