Snow ✓

Starbirds

The lackeys were all too eager to portion up hunks of a halfling.

Highness pulled another dagger from her belt and showed them how it's done. They took turns, a visceral hunger in their eyes until more metal than what adorned their belts had pooled under him, sticky and hot.

Whenever Tres' signature heat began rolling off him like a star burning its way through the atmosphere, Highness would drive another needle into his arm, filling him with what felt like liquid ice. His head rolled and black fuzzed up the edges of his vision as his body battled the foreign agents flooding his insides, and yet he hung onto the precipice of consciousness, looking out over that niggling oblivion.

Being mortal with all the advantages of immortality (save eternal life) had its disadvantages.

What felt like pure torture, Highness assured him were calculated experiments. They wanted to know the limits of his powers, what metals he could melt (the answer thus far: all of them, though copper made him the most constipated), what he might use his magic for in his "natural environment," ("Oh, you know, domestic stuffs, like keeping the cookfire, crafting candles, baking rounds of sourdough": that earned him another blade), and how they might harness it.

He once asked how she dared to be so liberal with metal, wasn't there a limited supply? There wasn't; folks all over the world were clamoring to see her vision realized. Lending her their metals and blacksmiths was a small price to pay.

Nikko entered somewhere between the fifth and seventh bloodletting and even then, Tres afforded him a bloody smile. "Doc, I gotta say, I think I've figured out why you've stayed stumped all these moons; there's not a lick of real science to be had in this place."

Jaw tight, Nikko eyed the thin wisp of steam emanating from the gaping slit in Tres' side. "Highness, I think it time for another needle."

"Not yet."

Nikko looked ready to grind his own teeth into a fine powder.

It was all Tres could do to not look at Nikko, for fear the man would see the mischief in his eye. "You really shouldn't let the kids play with the cutlery."

"Snide bastard," a guard grumbled.

That got Highness' attention. She ripped a lightning stick from the guard's belt, cranked the lever and electrified Tres. "Show me your mask."

His lidded eyes roved over her plunging neckline and he drawled: "Show me yours and I'll show you mine."

Zap.

No, that he wouldn't give them. They'd get only the humanistic visage, grin and glare that made them fear him most.

Highness took from her own belt a short dagger, this one with an elaborate hilt in the shape of a serpent with red jeweled eyes and a mouth open wide to accept the blade. She proffered it to a woman with puffy, red-rimmed eyes who stood at the back of the group. When her eyes met Tres', she stood a little straighter, a little meaner.

"For Adam," Highness said, still holding out the dagger, hilt first.

Tres scrutinized her as she approached and grabbed the dagger without breaking eye contact, her splash of freckles and the washed-out sea-green of her eyes—wait, he remembered those eyes, wide as saucers as the flesh around them liquified like a riverbed pummeled by a storm.

Sister, then, he guessed.

The woman stood over him, brow tight, mouth set as she rubbed a thumb roughly along the length of the serpent. Her cheek twitched. He wondered why she hesitated. Not out of empathy, surely. Then, he saw the twitch of her hand, the shake she was trying to steady by gripping the dagger. Fear. She shook with it.