Enigma

by RuNyx

Death was a curious thing. Planned or unplanned, mitigated or unmitigated, cruel or comfortable, it was the only universal truth that everyone lied about. Most adults she’d encountered spent their lives not thinking about it, trying to outrun it yet heading straight to it. She didn’t know if they realized what she had at such a young age—death was inevitable. It chased everyone from the moment of the first drawn breath and caught them at their last.

I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world. —Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

She had looked like a goddess, a mystical creature hovering over the dead, come to life from the sea behind her. And in that one instant, she had become his muse.

He had asked her to stay away and she had deliberately not. She’d thrown the gauntlet, and fuck him if he didn’t pick it up.

Caz van der Waal was an enigma, an unknown variable in her equation, an unsolved mystery, and she had always loved and hated those in equal measure.

“Try it. Try walking off a cliff, I will block you. Try making yourself bait, I will catch you. And try being with another man, I will use his blood and make you the canvas.”

“You could bring gods to their knees, you know that?”

“Because I was a man on the path to damnation and I saw salvation instead. Because being near you makes me feel something beyond rage. Because the chaos inside me quietens when I’m near you.” His words were shaking by the end of his sentence, his hands holding her possessively. “You’ve become my muse, little asp.”

“I want to be the only villain you see. I want to be the only devil who drags you to hell.”