Nothing's Conventional About Us

XXIX ~ Teal

When the world wakes screaming
At the wake of death,
The shade of flame dies down
And wakes the calm prowess 
Of the icy calm -
Of a war fought but never won. 
Of icy, smiling teal. 

Teal

"Do not toy with your food, Your Highness.", she probably would have smirked, but all she offered was a steely gaze and lush lips pressed in a hard line. Even as their carefully woven threads were tying themselves all together into the inescapable web. 

"Snakes are known to be slippery, love. I cannot help but worry till I have cornered and snuffed that filthy creature out entirely.", the word 'love' sounded so very odd in that blade-sharp voice of his, harder than ice hardened by centuries of winter and certainly more venomous than the snake in question. 

It was the war of guilt and that raging need for victory that warred in their minds. Such was the fate of war. It was more fought within than it could ever be fought outside. 

It was then that thunder resounded in the air and lightning begun striking with a vengeance. 

The Heir of the Thunder-Lord now smirked. 

His job was only being made easier in a bid to make it more difficult. 

Lightning was a paradox on its own - fire leading to water. 

So it recommenced. 

"You serve me my two favourite things on a silver platter, Father.", his voice was heard over the rain, the resonance of pure Divine echoing through every syllable, and yet his voice not a decibel above the normal, "War and a shot of the power that connects our bloods."

The sky roared and roiled, its own conflict boiling over between the present and the beauty of future possibility. 

"Stop.", the voice resonated through the rain and the clouds and the entirety of the sky, and his grip on his powers - the shields he had put up - flickered for only the fraction of a moment, and she immediately shot a hint of her own powers into the blend, strengthening it through the lightest of fissures. 

"Why should I?", the question lacked any emotion other than the underlining of a scoff. 

"Because the one you serve at this moment is using you as a-"

"Oh please, Father.", another dismissive scoff and yet unfaltering shower of arrows, unflinching, ruthless killing continued, "I know just what is happening here. He wants something and I want something. We want something. Just the way you want something, too. All you have to do is show the slightest hint of support - or even the slightest lack of staunch opposition would work - and we all get what we want."

"Do not pretend to know something that you do not quite know, son.", now the words resonated like thunder throughout the world around them.

And yet, the two of them knew that it was only a ruse. If the Lord of Heaven was something, he was a man bound to his word, and neither of the two younger Gods had come here scared to face half of the act. 

Keep him engaged, was all she whispered into his mind, her voice like the caress of seductive velvet in the reaches of his mindspace as she - now already having shielded the innocents from the worst of perils - coiled around the one person who had been plotted and guided and drawn here from across the sea to his destiny. 

"And what is it that you claim I know naught of?", his entire body was now vibrating with the surge of years of supressed emotions - rage and dejection and loneliness and sorrow and helplessness and desolation - and the calculative execution of probably the most important step towards the establishment of the momentary peace that he himself would probably never be part of, "Your absentee status as parents or how much you more about your throne and less about your true, legitimate heir that you had to remove him like bloody competition?"