Disclaimer: all characters portrayed here are property of Pearl Fatima. I have no connection with her or the Learning to Fly series.
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"Our end will come in candle-wax and milk."
He knew that it was her - knew it instinctively from the tips of his ears to the end of his tail, and her words rushed over him like a salt-water wind. He could feel them in his bones like black ice.
Somewhere, a hand was running over book-spines, arranged neatly on a shelf.
He turned, and she opened her mouth wide in what might have almost been considered a smile. She ran her pink tongue over her sharp teeth, and her green eyes glistened. He shivered involuntarily.
"Candle-wax and milk," she repeated. "That's all that will remain." Her voice rolled out of her mouth, like pebbles falling over one another on the sea-shore. It was inky-black.
The hand selected a book from the shelf. It ran its fingers lightly over the cover, before turning to the first page.
"That may well be," he replied, "but it's not the end, yet. Our first battle hasn't even been fought, yet."
She looked at a loss for a moment. Then, she shrugged. She turned and sauntered away. She swung her hips a little, and he could remember seeing her naked, her back glistening with droplets of sweat.
He thought about a snowdrop, wilting in the heat. He thought about the mother of his child.
The hand flipped through the book, rifling the pages impatiently to find the correct passage.
He could remember when he was very young, before he had barely been weaned, when he had grasped his own mother an eagle does its prey. (The snowdrop was milk and paper and untainted.) Then, he had been safe. He felt a roar build up inside of him, but he suppressed it.
"Our end will come in candle-wax and milk," she said. But when would the end be? And how would they get there? And where would the blood be spilled? A thousand quills were stabbing at his body all at once.
The hand found what it had been looking for. A voice spoke; someone, somewhere, was comforted.
And if the flower died? He clenched his fist and thought about her eyes and her naked back. She was a brutal angel, he thought. There were years behind them and years ahead of them, and he wasn't sure which was worse. Maybe it was the now, which was infinite.
The end would come, though, no matter what. He half-hoped that it would be like she had said. The ivory, the white, like an endless tunnel, could absorb him, and he could finally sleep.
Fin.