Backdated to late September.
Word Count: 633
“You’re a mean boy.”
He sensed the youma there long before he saw it, but paid it no heed until it spoke to him.
Aquamarine turned from the body of a Page — bloodstained fabric in various shades of purple, trimmed by a surfeit of ruffles and lace, with silver charms to denote this one as a servant of Saturn. The body was motionless, hair spread out along the ground in dark waves. The girl’s eyes had not even fully closed, locked in an unseeing stare toward the star-strewn sky.
The youma was a silhouette in the night, barely distinguishable among the shadows of trees. Its voice was light and toneless, a quiet break in the silence, a whisper on the breeze.
“I’ve no need for you,” Aquamarine said, voice edging toward command.
The Page’s starseed glimmered in his hand, catching the light of the quarter moon.
“No,” the youma agreed, slowly drifting into view.
Her form was that of a young woman — a thin body attached to the legs of a bird, whose sharply taloned feet rustled through the undergrowth. What skin remained in view beneath the dark, tattered remnants of clothing was unnaturally pale. Black feathers crowned her head atop a few stray tendrils of flaxen hair. Her wings and arms were one in the same, neither one nor the other, but both at once, shedding black feathers here and there.
Recognition widened Aquamarine’s gaze for a fraction of a second, before annoyance took over and narrowed it.
“You…” he said, irritated enough by her presence to sound hostile.
“Yes,” she agreed.
Her wide, black eyes gleamed, fierce and greedy, afixed not on his face, but on the starseed in his possession.
Aquamarine banished it immediately, sending it off into the small stash he’d collected in subspace.
Deprived of an easy meal, the youma wilted. She leaned against the trunk of a tree as though tired, taloned fingers scraping at the bark.
Again, she sighed, “You’re a mean boy.”
“So you’ve said.”
“Where’s my love?”
Months ago he saw her, back when summer was new, when the night was warm and humid, and music drifted on the breeze. She was perched up in a tree on that occasion, staring down at him with her creepy, soulless eyes — all that remained at the end of a path he’d not been aware of following.
The song he heard then was not her doing, but she posed the same inquiry, in the same airy voice — emotionless, almost detached from reality, a nonsensical question with no real answer.
When Aquamarine said nothing, she asked again, “Where’s my love?”
She seemed empty, hollow. Her eyes were devoid of life or knowledge.
“Are you even capable of that emotion?” Aquamarine countered.
She cocked her head, the picture of absentminded curiosity. “Are you?”
Aquamarine frowned. His eyes narrowed further, and his fingers curled into fists.
She’s just repeating random words, he told himself. She has no idea what the ******** she’s saying.
She was a youma, alive without living, a monstrous creature with little autonomy — human once, but no longer. She knew nothing of human life, or human emotions. She lurked about, seeking energy and starseeds in her time away from the Rift. No doubt she would ask the same of anyone. Her questions meant nothing.
“What the ******** are you talking about?” Aquamarine said. “Go away.”
Scratch scratch scratch went her talons against the tree.
This time, Aquamarine put an unmistakable command into his voice. “Go away.”
The youma stopped her scratching and looked at him with her cold, dead eyes. She sighed and turned to do as she was told, rustling through the foliage as she made her way through the shadows.
Her voice drifted back to him, a murmur on the wind.
“You’re a mean boy.”
