[When D offers his answer to Liem’s own question, the good humour in Liem’s expression dies like a candle flame snuffed out in a sudden wind. He stares warily up at the other man, tense and motionless, one cat encountering another unexpectedly in the street.
He looks like a dhampir: the pallor, the uncanny beauty, the youth that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. These are features that, until today, Liem had most often seen only in the mirror. In fact, he had never met another of his “own kind,” and had not expected that he ever would, even in this strange world between worlds.]
You admit it so freely, [he says quietly.] We are but strangers.
[How freeing it had been, to be taken from his home and find himself abruptly in a place where humanity was but a single colour of thread in the tapestry of races that made up the local inhabitants. How liberating, even amidst his isolation, that no one seemed to have so much as heard of the world from which he hailed. Nobody ever questioned his parentage, or gave him wary glances as he entered a room, or even startled when he took the dark lenses from his eyes.
But in the year since he’d seen his home, he had not forgotten such things.]
no subject
He looks like a dhampir: the pallor, the uncanny beauty, the youth that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. These are features that, until today, Liem had most often seen only in the mirror. In fact, he had never met another of his “own kind,” and had not expected that he ever would, even in this strange world between worlds.]
You admit it so freely, [he says quietly.] We are but strangers.
[How freeing it had been, to be taken from his home and find himself abruptly in a place where humanity was but a single colour of thread in the tapestry of races that made up the local inhabitants. How liberating, even amidst his isolation, that no one seemed to have so much as heard of the world from which he hailed. Nobody ever questioned his parentage, or gave him wary glances as he entered a room, or even startled when he took the dark lenses from his eyes.
But in the year since he’d seen his home, he had not forgotten such things.]