at the violet hour, when the eyes and back

Max Klein · 08-16-2012, 10:10 AM

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Max hardly comprehended that she was being serious about her fur, and took it as a joke. Like him, she was ill-suited for certain places and times—but the darkness favored her as it would never favor him, and he envied her for that. While he could vanish into the snow like a wraith himself, he was limited to its time of year. She had reign over the night, and if not for those brilliant gold eyes, might have been made of it herself. He admired her for this plainly, though his infatuation had never gone beyond this. She was older than him, and her aloof nature had warded him off as a boy.

At her question, he looked back up to the blanket of night. Since the fall of man the air had begun to clear itself, slowly weeding away the toxins and pollution of two-thousand or so more years. Ezekiel had told him that some places would never be clean, and mentioned lands that his father had seen. Max could not imagine such horrors—great wastelands where the air reeked of sulfur and poison, and where the sky burnt orange. They filled his head with nightmarish images, and he had cultivated many theories and stories to explain such places.

Here, though, they were blessed with true darkness and a sky nearly free of all those latent toxins. Every star could be seen, and even the Milky Way (which Max called by a different name) could be made out. He had managed to catch the same falling star, and out of the corner of his eye saw her expression shift. So even the a princess could be moved, he thought with no small amount of pride. It helped lower her (and by extension, the Lykoi family) to something mortal.

“That started a few hours ago,” he explained. “I think it must happen more than once,” he went on, and motioned for her to join him. “It did it before, when I first came here.” A year. He had called this place home for a year now, he realized, and his tail wagged a little at the thought of it.

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