These days, rearranging his Essence is less a matter of time as it is one of will - it takes effort to do away with the densely muscled shape of the lioness, to unwind and remake the sharp moon bright teeth and the heavy paws and the short tawny fur. In another place, he might have been a blackbird fast as blinking. He would have popped the latch on the window, pressed open the pane and been away into the night before Kitty had even pulled the door completely shut behind her. But here, it is a matter of both instinct and shackle. Where once the pentacle bound him, he is now strangely untethered. Smoke twisting in an uncorked bottle, so used to the shape of the glass it has been made to fit in that drifting up and outwards seems almost unnatural; where once he was free, the rift shard now snags and snarls like the sharp ends of a particularly pointy bramble bush. How far does he stretch into the tangle, knowing that with each change - with each flex of power -, that he is baiting the thing that wants to devour him?
The point is, it isn't any easier to stop being the lioness than it is to start. Maybe that is why he is still there when the door again comes open.
But that seems unlikely. The shape he's chosen isn't made for evening escapes out of upper floor windows. Sitting cross-legged on Kitty's bed is the boy. It is not, Bartimaeus thinks, any particular one. The shape he had taken to sit in the Inquisition's dungeons had been purposefully anonymous, a familiar face which he sometimes liked to remember turned half away or seen as if viewed from a distance. The boy is familiar in the way all boys are, and he is particular only around the eyes and in the fine white scar on the side of his forefinger. Ptolemy had cut himself there while sharpening the point of a reed pen and he likes to see the mark of it now a thousand years on even as the hands themselves have been formed purposefully incorrect.
The boy sits with his chin in his hand. In the most rapturous, tear-streaked, over the top simpering he can manage, Bartimaeus says, "I've been looking all over and I don't know what to do."
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2019-08-17 11:17 pm (UTC)The point is, it isn't any easier to stop being the lioness than it is to start. Maybe that is why he is still there when the door again comes open.
But that seems unlikely. The shape he's chosen isn't made for evening escapes out of upper floor windows. Sitting cross-legged on Kitty's bed is the boy. It is not, Bartimaeus thinks, any particular one. The shape he had taken to sit in the Inquisition's dungeons had been purposefully anonymous, a familiar face which he sometimes liked to remember turned half away or seen as if viewed from a distance. The boy is familiar in the way all boys are, and he is particular only around the eyes and in the fine white scar on the side of his forefinger. Ptolemy had cut himself there while sharpening the point of a reed pen and he likes to see the mark of it now a thousand years on even as the hands themselves have been formed purposefully incorrect.
The boy sits with his chin in his hand. In the most rapturous, tear-streaked, over the top simpering he can manage, Bartimaeus says, "I've been looking all over and I don't know what to do."