Over six minutes of pure bliss.
Funny, I don’t love the Eagles. But I got that album on vinyl, just for the album version of that piece of melancholic heaven.
That’s my ‘what would I save in a fire’ answer.
My records.
And if I had time, my insects. Framed, glass-protected butterflies and moths and dragonflies, mounted to my bedroom wall, forever preserved.
I would save those, too.
Bee hates them.
Creeps her out, I think. Usually doesn’t sit well with other people, my insect collecting hobby.
But my mum worked as a cleaner at the zoo when I was young, nightshift, and she brought me along with her when she couldn’t find a sitter.
It was there I found my first framed fake insect. I was about eight, maybe nine years old.
It stuck.
I would save those and my vinyls.
Everything else can burn.
The cold warrior apparently decides my phone is useless, or that I have no need for it, and he tosses it to the right pile.
My mouth thins on silenced words of protest.
As if sensing the temper swelling in me, his gaze cuts to me, and it’s harsh.
I glare out the corner of my eye at him, but only for a hot second before a deafening shriek spears through the hot springs.
A wince cuts sharp through my parted mouth.
I twist around, my spine aching, and throw my gaze to the next pool up.
There, I find the source of the shout.
A man, a captive, balances bowls on his arms, delivering the next lot of meals, but he’shopping.
One leg hiked, his other bounces up and down, up and down; glitter sparkles all around him—and there’s a splash of crimson falling from his lifted foot.
It takes me a moment to understand what I’m seeing.
That man has a knife in his lifted foot. A knife like all the other blades sunken into the earth around where he stands…
He’s fighting the need to fall down, to hold his injured foot—and it clicks.
What he’s really fighting is the release of the bowls in his arms, dropping them to the rocks, letting food spill all over the boulders. So he hugs the bowls to himself as he hops and grunts against his searing pain.
The fae parked around the pool are split with grins, some of them rumbling with laughter. A light-haired female strikes out a blade, and it’s fast followed by an arrow, released by a light-haired male. Siblings, so alike in their sharp features, sandy hued hair, sawdust eyes—that they might even be twins.
Twins in nature, they torment the man.
Arrow after knife, knife after arrow, all aimed at his still-planted boot, as if trying to throw him off balance without actually making contact.
But a knife did make contact. And the wound spills hot crimson from his lifted boot.
