Re: The Icarus/The Fallen
“It wasn’t a choice,” he said darkly, with a glimmer of glower at the edges of his words like starlight splendor flashing off a blade. He was almost sullen about it as he sat there with a stranger’s hand pressed to his ribs, fiercely hoping to feel a heartbeat stirring. He had the sense that Enlil didn’t mean to make him feel a fool, rather that it was his own inexperience in human expression and things like wit. “I was deemed no longer suited to a glorious existence.”
Nathaniel was, for the record, finding it anything but dull. Discomfiting, both over- and underwhelming in the same breath, but certainly not dull. The difference being that rather than inspiring terror in the hearts of man with his fearsome beauty and wrath, the fear was now incubating in some visceral part of him. Rather like a virus.
He could not picture Enlil tethered down, so close did he seem to the teetering cliff’s edge of flight with the flutter of each long finger. Every warble against the keys plucked at something inside Nathaniel, a sensation for which he had no name but that hauled up skeletons from the deep and the dark. They felt like the empty shells of sunken ships, misshapen and crusted over with barnacles so that their names could not be read. A particularly tall mast rose up until it pierced through the bottom of his jaw, pinned his tongue to the roof of his mouth and filled his mouth with iron that was oily-hot as it dripped down his throat; was this excitement? Anticipation?
“I’m not afraid to hurt,” he replied automatically, although a pulse of some strange, cold feeling under the palm of Enlil’s hand perhaps hinted otherwise. “Do it.”