(Song of Shadows)
(unfinished, because Zyn? Still has no character development.)

Von recognizes, sometimes, that he is surrounded by beautiful people, and that this is a totally unnatural phenomenon.

First there was Ari'i. He could hardly remember a time without her, without the slide of her soft, curving limbs and the taste of her sweet dark skin. The first time their eyes met, he knew her, knew what she was: the most beautiful woman in the world. There was a fire beneath her skin that lit up her eyes when she smiled and when she moved she glimmered, heavy and golden. She was beautiful, blindingly beautiful, in a way that mere humans could neither rival nor comprehend.

Then there was Cata, who came out of nothingness and often seemed as though she would wither away into so much nothingness once again. The sharp angle of her hips and the strip of bare skin between her tank top and her skirt were agressive and angry and brittle like broken glass. She glittered, too, with her harsh lines and angles refracting the light into thousands of tiny, fragile rainbows. Insubstantial and delicate, but sharp enough to make you bleed without realizing it, sharp enough to cut to the bone. But if you looked beyond her fashion magazine figure and the fishnets and spiked collars you saw the way her mascara bled around eyes that didn't just glitter but burned and raged with a light so intense it hurt. And then you wondered how she didn't burn up from the inside, with eyes like those. She was fragile and flawed and nearly broken, but she was lovely, dark and bleeding and beautiful.