Ni'Srilan: The Desert: Hoppípola! -- Alkohol.

The thorns he spares when the rose is taken;
The rocks are left when he wastes the plain;
The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken,
These remain.

The desert was dead.

In those brief moments with her – his niece, though he was no older than she was – he could feel just how dead it was. Even the wildlife felt distant, sluggish, as if hesitant to know life. Even tumbleweed seemed like a distant dream. Almost… bucolic.

The desert was dead.

“Ah,” he comments aloud and his eyes – dark mahogany – just rover up and down her body. But it’s not the feminine curves that attract his gaze – relation wouldn’t matter; sexual orientation did – or even the stark white of her fur.

It’s the blood.

It would take a better man than Alerion to resist its allure; he could still remember the taste, that near-obsession that seemed to crop unexpected in his family.

It was unnerving.

“Well then,” he snorts, because though he doesn’t care one iota for the fate of the Element and would rather cheer as it destroyed itself, family mattered. That was the one bind that held them together. Family. That unadorned, silly word but laden with such meaning. “I have no diseases. Might as well donate to such a fine cause.”

It was the silliest explanation for a shard that he’d heard – not that he’d heard much about shards, as he didn’t care – but he tilted his neck anyway, offering the length of it and the side of his shoulder to her – father’s – thirst.

“Feast away, little niece,” he laughed. It wasn’t a nice laugh. “Let’s tear the world apart.”

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of eros and of dust