CALAMITY, MASSACRE, TYRANT #2
She cast a look to Mak’kon, who nodded off his glamour.
His skin became obsidian but for an errant streak of red overtaking his whole scalp.
His veins thumbed red and black under his glassy skin.
Even with eyes an unnatural gold, Esme felt the intensity of his stare.
There was no rage, no resentment. He watched her like a man who had too much to say for the air in his lungs and no idea how to say it.
Esme had no clue how to hear it, either, so she turned back to the man from the Valosia. “And you—you’ll come on that walk with me, won’t you?”
The man crossed his arms. “I don’t know if I should. You seem dangerous.”
“Only sometimes,” Esme said with a wink but kept walking. Soon, she heard his heavy steps follow hers, and his long strides soon brought them side by side.
“So, are you the leader?” he asked.
They’d come to a less densely packed street and Esme turned down the winding path that would take her west. She could hear the ruckus from here, but they had time to chat for a few paces more.
“No. I just tend to be the one with a plan,” she said, sweeping her hair back and into a bun at her neck.
“I trust you also have a plan, Mr. Nameless?”
“A plan?”
“Yes. I assume that when an ancient, angry half-god comes to a Magicless little world, he has a plan,” she said easily, casting a look over at him. He didn’t have a Micrean name, but he did have a name.
The Song. Of “Song’s balls” fame.
The Song stopped so suddenly Esme thought he’d tripped on a rat. Instead, he was standing there, wide-eyed to the point of looking young.
“How did you know?”
“You practically told me during the Valosia,” Esme said, turning to face him. “And I saw you sing to the flames. It didn’t take long to figure out.”
The Song smirked and clasped his hands behind his back. “Is this where you threaten me, Esme?” he drawled. He drew out the syllables of her name, trying it on. It sounded erotic in his accent.
“Why should I threaten you?”
“Did your mother never tell you about what I do to places like this?” The Song took a long, deadly step close to her.
“That you like to tear them open and feast on their innocents?” she said carefully, tilting her head. “Are you here to eat me, Mr. Song?” She took her own step forward, and then eased to the side to walk a tight circle around him. “You have me alone.”
“Are you asking me to eat you?” he asked her over his shoulder. “You look excited.”
Esme finally returned to face him. Up this close, it was so obvious what he was. The sun banged against the bars of his glamour.
“You don’t have to keep this on,” Esme said, swiping a finger through the air thickened to a sludge by his glamour. “It’s just you and me.”
“I am terrifying. It would move you to madness to behold me.”
“Try to move me, then.”
His lips curled into a smile against his earnest attempts to look intimidating. “As you request.”
His glamour slipped away with all the teasing slowness of a woman unlacing her stays.
The Song was far from a monster. He was horned and fanged, and his eyes crackled with an inferno, but the son of an angry god had dimples in his cheeks and a little crick in his nose Esme might spend hours on if she ever sculpted him.
His canines were a touch too sharp and long for his mouth, poking against his plush bottom lip, and she had the sudden urge to prick her finger on one of them.
Behind him, a writhing ocean of black hair danced in his heat.
From under his mostly unbuttoned shirt, Esme glimpsed a cloud of smoke tattoos on his skin.
When she peeked inside for a closer look, that cloud traveled to his chest and shoulder before twisting into a black storm.
There was something almost joyous to its churning.
“Are you mad yet?” he asked, chin dropping to look deeper into her eyes.
She moved her hand through the space between them again. The slurry of heat didn’t dare scald her. Her lips wobbled and her face twisted up in horror.
The Song’s face dropped, and he pulled his glamour back on to stop her oncoming insanity.
Esme dropped her act the second she realized he was actually worried. “Oh, don’t tell me you were serious?”
The Song swallowed thickly, looking from side to side. “Some tend to panic and piss themselves,” he said.
“Mm-hmm,” Esme said, then gave him another long look. “Show me again.”
Slowly, he did as she said, and she walked around him a second time.
“Far as I can tell, you’re tall and pretty,” she said. “What’s so scary about that?”
The Song sucked in a breath so deep he might have stolen every drop of air out of the alley. His shoulders locked up, and the smoke on his shoulders crept up to swirl on his cheeks. He blushed smoke.
“I am here looking for someone,” he blurted, still smoky and anxious. “An old… friend.”
Esme thought it sweet that even Songs had friends. She nodded and moved on to the question that really mattered. “Well, how’d you get here?” He had to have come from a Void, and if there was a Void, there was a way back to Is-Khan.
The Song scratched his neck. “Well, I have a gracious sister,” he said. “She can open Voids at will, and she opens them for me to travel through. I tend to not be able to stay in one world for long before someone finds out who I am.” He gave an awkward smile. “The price of fame.”
“The Void can be opened at will?” Esme asked, stepping forward excitedly. “Can she open it right now?”
“She opens it once in a decade, and from afar. I have no way to contact her until she opens the portal. I’ve only been here for about a year.” The Song’s brows drew in. “Do you not have a Void?”
Esme’s face fell. Every time she got one step closer to going home, Omniel found a way to kick her ten paces back. “We did. And then a human piss bag destroyed it.”
“You can’t destroy a Void,” the Song said. “You can only break it into pieces, but it can always be re-formed. You can even use a piece of it for smaller Magic trades.”
Esme’s despair drowned in an ocean of hope. “So, there are still pieces of it, then?”
“A Void must exist in this world. Look at this place.” He waved a hand, gesturing at Amaris’s general fuckedness. “It’s probably been quietly existing in pieces ever since it was broken. You just have to find them and put them back together.”
Esme laughed. It bubbled right up out of her, and she slapped a hand to her mouth because she hadn’t thought she could make such a sound. Her heart beat so fast it might destroy her ribs.