wc: 300+
Still her gaze lingered, the piercing mineral green unable to tear itself from the portrait of this half-stranger, this avenging and yet somehow terrible man. The muscles in her stomach remained clenched, her tense form unable to relax whilst the collie-woman observed him. The air itself thrummed with the energy of not moving, of staying perfectly still.
The dust settled. "Gabriel." His name sounded funny in her lilting voice, tasted strange on her tongue. Jade optics narrowed, an illusionist feat considering their strange hue. Gabriel. The nymph rolled it on her tongue, testing for familiarity, her mind strangely conjuring thoughts of water closing over her head. The sinews along her bones tightened, slivers of steel, that peculiar name resounding heavier and heavier, until she could see the ocean sky growing dim as water separated her from it, the weight of something - a necklace - bearing down around her slender neck.
Absently, one ivory hand rose to encircle her throat, as if testing the silken arch there for the heavy weight of a metal noose.
She remained poised atop the concrete pylon a moment more, suspended there like some cream and ivory siren, before dropping down to the earth to land lightly on the balls of her footpaws. Her eyes never left him, and when she straightened, the man was clearly taller. As she'd known he would be, Gabriel was twice as formidable when one was level with him. The dagger danced lithely between her ivory fingers, still held as a harmless thing at her side.
"I knew you once." The words surprised her, but they felt true, hanging between them in the thick twilight air. She took a step closer, emerald eyes running up and down the man's dangerous frame. "You, he, was different then... Perhaps I am wrong." Doubt pervaded Alaine's broken memory. This man was a killer - She could tell. She could smell the death that surrounded him. A frown marred the woman's foreign, pixie figures, casting shadows over the jade eyes that sought his own; This man was danger, but she got the deep and settling sense that he would not harm her. The hesitant wind teased auburn ringlets to dance about her face, and the healer tucked them behind one floppy ear.
A pause, and then: "You have his eyes, the boychild... I think I knew you, once."
Speak think walk
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