[The lighter kindles more than the torch. The evidence of that is scrawled across the man who so ignites with the flickering flame summoned by the practiced roll of thumb across minute metal teeth. The torch flares up with his chill, sure smile, the one that strikes her as a kind of desperate triumph.
Mercymorn the First doss not look at the fire. She looks at him as if seeing him for the very first time, like all the versions of him from the shoreline to the top of this tower were the ghosts. Shadows hollow out the underbellies of her eyes as she observes him through newborn light.
She has always noted the presence of unexpected teeth.
With that thought, she pivots and plunges the torch into the great lamp of the lighthouse. It roars into brilliance and heat as tattered sails tack impossibly away, ship and island both this time spared an end. The glittering eyes of the dead look up and past their too-late rescuers, and Mercy follows their pointing fingers to the receding hulk in the black.]
That's that, th- nn!
[The interruption to her quiet, half-mused thought comes as an angry little curl of sound as she drops the torch with a sparking, sputtering clatter into the blood and claps her hands over her popping ears, face contorted into a grimace.]
I hate ghosts.
[She seethes, vehement to the point of near tears, in the receding unatmospheric pressure of spiritual absence.]
no subject
Mercymorn the First doss not look at the fire. She looks at him as if seeing him for the very first time, like all the versions of him from the shoreline to the top of this tower were the ghosts. Shadows hollow out the underbellies of her eyes as she observes him through newborn light.
She has always noted the presence of unexpected teeth.
With that thought, she pivots and plunges the torch into the great lamp of the lighthouse. It roars into brilliance and heat as tattered sails tack impossibly away, ship and island both this time spared an end. The glittering eyes of the dead look up and past their too-late rescuers, and Mercy follows their pointing fingers to the receding hulk in the black.]
That's that, th- nn!
[The interruption to her quiet, half-mused thought comes as an angry little curl of sound as she drops the torch with a sparking, sputtering clatter into the blood and claps her hands over her popping ears, face contorted into a grimace.]
I hate ghosts.
[She seethes, vehement to the point of near tears, in the receding unatmospheric pressure of spiritual absence.]