The wind fared no better — and, in a sense, fared far worse, because the wind, unlike the chill, insisted on making a public spectacle of its own humiliation.
It ca howling across the island’s upper atmosphere with the self-important bluster of a minor deity convinced it still mattered, caught the hem of her crimson kimono — tonight’s iteration, embroidered with cherry blossoms that pulsed faintly like dying embers — and lifted.
The silk fluttered, billowed, snapped and rippled against the night like a war banner planted in conquered territory by a conqueror who had already grown bored and wandered off.
The fabric climbed her thighs, exposing another deliberate inch of pale skin, another calculated centitre of the curved, taut landscape the hemline had been engineered to suggest rather than reveal—
And for one suspended, wind-blasted mont the kimono beca more flag than garnt, more declaration than clothing, everything from just below the swelling curve of her lower ass covered in a lace, to the full bare architecture of her legs offered to the shrieking dark without apology, without explanation, without the faintest flicker of concern.
And Consort did not adjust it.
She did not reach down to press the fabric to her thighs nor did she deign to acknowledge the wind’s presumption with so much as a downward glance.
She simply hovered there in the howling void, kimono snapping around her like a crimson fla, pink hair utterly, impossibly, defiantly still — not a single strand disturbed — the very picture of a woman who had decided ten thousand years ago that physics was an advisory note best ignored and had never bothered to revisit the mo.
’If it weren’t for the absurdly expensive penthouse between us,’ Eira mused, ’I would bet the ambient chill alone could freeze a mortal solid in minutes. But no. Consort is not mortal, Consort is a World Transcendent — a few polite incrents from Lesser God — and the cold of this realm brushes against her sensorium with all the profound impact of a single grain of sand upon the hull of a warship. Unless it’s so genuinely primordial frozen hellscape where temperature itself is as sharp as a blade, a November night above a resort island is beneath her in every sense the word can carry.’
Eira knew a few places like that.
’Shortie is indeed a seductress at the atomic level.’
That was the observation Eira could not escape. Consort behaved as though she were a blade — the One Above’s instrunt, cold, purposeful, devoid of personal vanity — but the body she inhabited and the garnts she selected to drape it told an entirely different, far more entertaining narrative.
Her kimonos were always short and just as sinful and cut to the exact millitre just abopve her lace covered ass, that turned the theological debate between is she wearing underwearand does it even matter at this point into performance art.
When it wasn’t kimonos, it was the maid uniforms of the Ashford Estate, which achieved the sa devastating result through different tailoring. The only variation was colour. The size, the hemline, the degree of carnal audacity — eternally, gloriously identical.
’And they’re always different garnts.’
At her level she could conjure her own garnts with a thought, but Consort’s kimono’s were not materialised from aether by a lazy wave of a World Transcendent’s hand, which Consort could have done with less effort than blinking.
Eira could tell that these were purchased, from whatever baroque process a ten-thousand-year-olddivine-tier assassin employed to go shopping — a ntal image Eira found simultaneously hilarious and deeply unsettling and refused to examine further for fear it would ruin her entire evening.
’She actually enjoys it,’ Eira thought, watching the motionless silhouette against the island’s distant lights. ’The small, stupid human rituals. Choosing fabric, selecting colour and deciding that tonight requires crimson rather than obsidian. She buys her own clothes.’
Eira glanced down at herself — at the unchanging, translucent crystalline attire that had been her only garnt for... well.
For a duration she preferred not to calculate, because the number would make her feel things she had carefully organised her emotional life to avoid feeling.
’Should I try it soti?’
The thought arrived unbidden and lingered with the peculiar warmth of a suggestion that knew it was good and was prepared to wait.
’Clothes. Real clothes. Chosen. Not grown from the substrate of my elental form, not crystallised from ambient frost. Actually, selected from a collection of options by a person — by — who looked at multiple items and said: that one. I want that one.
"Maybe soti. That would feel nice, wouldn’t it?"
She dismissed the thought—
Consort had always been with them.
Shadowing them even on the aeroplane.
It was rely that Phei had been too preoccupied to ask Eira her whereabouts lately, to needle her the way he relished doing — ordering Eira to point out exactly where Consort was hovering so he could fix those athyst eyes on the empty air and let the shortie feel, in the pit of whatever she used instead of a stomach, the dreadful prickling awareness that the dragon she was surveilling was surveilling her right back.
’He always enjoys doing that.’ The little ga of it, performative omniscience and the way Consort would — if the blade of the One Above felt any trepidation to begin with, which Eira privately doubted — stiffen almost imperceptibly at the realisation that the prey had located the predator.
Eira shook her head as if rembering what her thoughts had been before this. ’Nah. There was no way Consort felt anything resembling discomfort from the mortal realm’s weather. After all, only a genuinely frozen zone — sothing primordial, sothing that could rattle a Divine Realm being at the fundantal level — would make her feel anything. The cold up here is beneath her in every sense the word could carry.’
The One Above was almost certainly watching whatever Phei was doing through those crimson eyes. Observing and monitoring the developnt of a dragon they intended, eventually, to own. And Phei had never once asked Eira to obscure his actions from Consort’s surveillance.
Never requested a veil and never asked her to construct an obstruction between his activities and the crimson gaze that tracked them.
He was showing everything.
Every power, conquest, intimate vulnerability. Deliberately with the calculated transparency as he understood that dissimulation from sothing that powerful was futile and that the superior stratagem was to let it observe and draw whatever conclusions it pleased.
It was annoying, yes.
Profoundly, teeth-grindingly, fairy-tantrum-inducingly annoying.
But he was doing it anyway.
Because the alternative was getting yet another power enemy before he was ready.
Eira shrugged — a gesture that, at her diminutive stature, amounted to the displacent of approximately three molecules of air — and averted her eyes from the katana-wielding shortie.
As she liked to call her.
A pot calling a kettle black, admittedly, given that Eira herself asured roughly seven inches in vertical stature on an auspicious day and could comfortably slumber inside a teacup. But at least she didn’t carry a sword longer than her own body and pretend it was a personality.
The night continued.
Consort watched.
Eira watched Consort.
And sowhere between the two of them — separated by glass and glass and ten thousand years of divergent servitude — Phei was slumbering, blissfully oblivious to the fact that two of the most perilous won in his orbit were spending their evening scrutinising each other from opposite sides of a window, each quietly persuaded she comprehended him more thoroughly than the other.
Neither of them was entirely mistaken.
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