veer

It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be.
But you understand, don’t you?

erhaps if he were another male he would have been caught like a fly in honey by the silken caress of her ribbons. Maybe then Veer would have smiled like a lamb and followed the siren call of her and dove headfirst into the red hot sea of her.  If he were another sort of stallion he would have smiled and laughed as he drowned.

But Veer is not a fly or a thing to be trapped in waves of sensuous appeal. Veer is bottomless pit of need and want, rage and hunger. When he ruffles his feathers he's suddenly not dipped in gold but black. He could be the night for how dark he seems when he looks at her with both pity and desire flashing in molten sparks across his gaze. “Spoken like a true creature of the earth.” Veer sounds like a universe when he taunts her, all cold winter wind and salted storm seas.

This time when he closes the distance between them it's into the press of her blue ribbons. They dance around him like a thin silken webs and he laughs as they tangle and tease at his legs. He wonders if she fancies herself a spider, a siren or a snake. There is nothing shy about him, nothing coy. Veer is only boldness, only sin.

“Shall I bury you in it then?” He's a threat too, and his wing arc above them like a church steeple. “Will it comfort you to feel dirt beneath your teeth instead of air?” Perhaps it's a blessing that she moves away then, trailing rose-petals like tears.

Veer almost wanted to strike then, although he still hasn't decided if we wants to corrupt her love her.

For now, though, he follows her like a wolf stalks a lamb. The art around them in nothing to Veer, nothing more than pillars of wealth in the darkness that he knows will return home with him. Each twist of gold, each glimmer of glass, each sheen of moonlight on silver, belongs to him. Foolish Denocte, tearing down a gate and welcoming all the beasts in to drink from pools of wine and sin.

They should have known the monsters would come. The monsters always come.

It's not until she stops that Veer ceases sharing with Najjad the list of all the things the belong to him now. When he turns to watch his little siren and the art she has found Veer smiles wickedly and adds in that silent chord between stallion and gryphon, one more thing, Najjad. This is too is ours. The gryphon clacks his beak like the single tick, tick of a metronome as Veer joins her before the golden apple.

“It makes me think of how the world began.” He lifts his wings up to drape across her back. Each of his feathers whispers against another feather, until his wings sound like a siren song of their own, urging the blue ribbons to tangle between them. “But as for feeling--” His words smolder on his lips as he presses them close enough to her ears that he thinks it might be fun to grab one between his teeth and pull.

“That I would have to show you.” He says, and never has he felt more like a god than he does tonight.

veer

It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be.
But you understand, don’t you?

here is a moment, only a brief one, where the golden apple is brighter than him. It comes to him like an epiphany that he is more wicked than a apple, more wicked than a million different sins. For a moment, that tiny silver in time where the moonlight loves the apple instead of him, that he might taste like freedom (sweet and bitter and like a god) if she was brave enough.  

But then the moonlight shifts and returns to him. Once more he's bright and hungry and alive, alive, alive. Soon he only wonders if she is as hungry as he is, if she might look at him, count his feathers and add all the number of him to a list too.

Veer doesn't think he'd mind, not tonight, not when it suits him to be counted and claimed.

Yet the night still ticks ever onward and each moment rings to him like a shovel against a coffin. Clang, clang, clang. Veer feels like a legend, a creature of the night that instead of drowning in an ocean decided to drink it until he was bloated and full of all the secrets of the sea. Fitting then, is it, that she whispers and rings out through the darkness like a siren song.

He lifts his wing from her spine and rises both wings above their heads. He imagines their bones like altars and his feathers like gods, a million faces peering down at their mortal flesh and imagining all the ways in which they might repent. And perhaps that is what makes him bury his nose into her silk and her mane and coo, “There is no promise I would make to you that I do not intend to keep.” Najjad reminds him of the list and they both know that those little things marked with mine are all promises too.

Already he has forgotten about the apple and all the gold (except the gold that is on him). The only art he cares about now is blue and red and bone white. He is shallow and wanting and his laughter is full of hollowness, like a great-bellied snake that circles a world and waits to consume even the religions of that world. He laughs and he wants and he drags his teeth in a kiss down her neck.

“It's only the cleverest of devils that make you think they can't feel, love” He does not deny that he is a devil, although he ponders again that he would be a better god than a monster of the dirt and magma. Isn't it obvious, he thinks, that he is made to fly above the universe and anything in it? “But inside they feel. Oh they feel so many things.” His lips and his teeth would etch the words into her skin, tangle them into her ribbons if only she was brave enough to sink instead of flee.

“They can feel rage, want, desire and hate.” What he doesn't say is that they can feel satisfaction. That they have never learned to feel. He pulls back, holds his breath and meets his gold gaze to her ocean deep ones. He thinks mine, mine, mine and his lungs quiver with the need for air as he lets the night tick onward like shovels against coffins.

“Even a devil can learn to love.” And when he finally takes a mouthful of air his lungs ache with the sweetness of it, of her.

Veer has always known the sweetest things in life come after suffering.

veer

It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be.
But you understand, don’t you?

eer feels a bloom of something that might be a little like satisfaction when she drinks of all the spaces around him like an offering. She sips at him like blood and drags her ribbons across him as if he is a knife. He wonders if she wants to know if she can still feel pain. And he promises, in feathers that fall around them like rain, that he would be happy to show her. He would etch scripture into her flesh with bones if she let him.

She could be his religion and he her god.

So of course he lets her taste of him and drag her fangs down his skin as if he might be impressed by her violence. He's not of course, he is the only violence this night. And oh! The hunger in him boils sinks through his body like molten gold. He could be a statue for how still he stands under her touches. Only his feathers and his gold chains sing for her ribbons and her kisses.

His smile is bright on his face, brighter than the moon, when he looks down, down, down at her. “Such cold words to describe love. How sad.” Veer folds his feathers down and one tucks to his side and one slams down against her. “But it's not cold.” When he catches a falling rose-petal between his teeth it tastes both sweet and bitter on his tongue.

He swallows it.

“Love is like swallowing the sun.” What he wants to say is that love is like swallowing him whole, like being eaten from the inside out. It tastes like gold and wealth and copper (metallic like blood). He wants to say that he knows how like the sun he feels.

A part of him wonders if she can taste the sand on him, taste the heat that wants to melt her flesh from bone (and see all the secrets inside her). He could make a masterpiece of her then-- a pyre.

But then like all women she pushes and pushes and pretends that he is made for anything but destruction; her destruction. He breaks her kiss with teeth, pulling at her lips like a wolf fretting at a bone. “You're right.” The feathers of his wings are not loving now, they are hungry. Najjad snaps his beak and eats silently at the sudden weight in the air around them.

But of course even as he pulls away Veer still thinks and counts, mine, mine, mine.

“I never would.” It's all he says before him and Najjad turn and walk into the darkness of the mountain garden. The dissolve into the darkness easier than two bright, golden things should.