He's mad, and she knows it. In between them, the broken mirror that Alina had been supposedly using for practice - and that a too strong sunbeam had destroyed it, Alina curling into herself to avoid shards while the Darkling used his Cut on them, a sea of small particles making the floor glitter.
"What did I say about control?" He asked, voice too soft to be anything but barely constrained anger. Alina, risen and doing her best not to tremble, kept her chin up.
"To keep it, but then you started talking, and I couldn't focus."
"A battlefield won't be silent." The Darkling snapped back, cutting the distance between them slowly. He grabbed the book he had been reading out loud, opening it where he had stopped. "Again."
Alina gritted her teeth and obeyed, trying to drown out his voice. She had managed to do so, the light she had summoned carefully snaking through the remaining mirrors, when the Darkling - acting out the scenes on the books like he actually cared for the words on the paper, like they meant something to him - roared like the book's dragon, childish and out of character for him. Alina lost control, busy staring at him, and the Darkling caught himself, closing the book.
"That's it for today. If this gets out..." He groaned, and Alina couldn't help but laugh - controlling herself at the last second, sticking a hand in front of her mouth. He left in a flurry of black fabric, and Alina had the decency to wait until she heard the door close behind her before she allowed the laughter to flow out of her, doubling over.
A tendril of darkness curled itself around her ankle, too cold to be anything but a warning, and Alina shooed it away with a ray of light of her own. If he would not let her have fun, she might as well have fun at his expense. Who'd have thought that the Darkling, mighty and all-powerful, would get so engrossed in a book he'd forget himself? She filed that information away for later, and went to her room to rest.
