Elif had never seen snow before these last few months. 

In her brief and sun-drenched three years of life, she had never left Solterra. Not even with the use of her wings had she ever touched a feather to the air of another court; her heart had never strayed from the golden city and neither did she. 

So when it first began to fall, it was easy to think it was the end of the world. Ash would have been more likely in these wind-swept winters, but ash did not melt on your tongue, or pack and shift beneath your feet. She hadn’t been sure what to make of it, at first, but Altan, around for one of his fleeting visits, had drug her into a snowball fight in front of the palace. 

It had been years since she’d had that much fun. 

Most of it is gone, now, but there are still blue-shadowed drifts of it in the places where the canyon walls prevent the slanted spring sunlight. Out of the corner of her eye, it doesn’t look too different from sand - a little too cool-toned, but the shadows lay the same on its surface. 

It’s next to a snowbank that she lands, radiating enough of a chill to raise a shiver as she flicks dry her wings and tucks them to her sides. From the air, this box canyon had looked indistinguishable from the many others that spread like a maze through Elatus, but Elif sees now that it is not the same at all. 

The sand and dirt here has been packed tight by countless hooves, and there are grooves worn in the stone. As she walks further in, each hoof step echoing, the stench of sweat and musk becomes unmistakable, as do the stains far darker than any seam of ore. There are dusty barrels stacked beneath a shallow cavern in the canyon wall and ahead of her there is a narrow passageway, the only proof that it led anywhere a small bleed of light. Beyond, there is the faint sound of voices. 

She is certain that this is the place her brother was killed. 

Elif sucks in a breath that burns from the cold, and steps into that brief darkness. 





@Veer

“Do not be afraid to bare your teeth -”

The path slopes downward.

Elif is not afraid - so she tells herself, even as her heart seems to echo louder in the semi-darkness - but even so she pulls a little wind in behind her, a breath of cold, clean air against her cheek like a ghost’s caress. Anyway, it is not a far path; she is only submerged in shadow for a few breaths (she does not care for the feeling, does not like being underground and separated from the sky - like being swallowed up by a snake) before the light is on her hooves, and then her slender forelegs, and then the slopes of her shoulders and her fine-boned face.

It takes her a moment, then, to see him. She must blink back the sunlight, however limited it is in this place, and at first when her eyes make out his shape he is nothing but black.

He was killed by a black pegasus. You need know nothing further.

At once she tenses like a mongoose before a cobra, like a hawk about to stoop. Her thoughts are not thoughts but flashes of gold, sparks of flame that ricochet off the blackness of him, that circle around the carved-out space they are in and wing back to her, no less urgent or angry.

But before she can act, can move her leaden, burning tongue, he lifts a wing and his true color is revealed. Her eyes adjust and he is not black at all, but a brown richer than any soil of the desert, and bronze, and molten gold. When she blows out a breath the wind sighs with her, relieved.

She might have smiled, then, had he not said what he did.

Her gaze had been straying, making sense of the place she’d just walked into, but it flickers back to him at his words, and her chin lifts, defiant. “I’m not.” Only a girl’s voice, but a girl with bloody knuckles, with tangled hair, with her jaw set. A girl who hates to be told what she is.

He should frighten her - because of where she found him if not for the simple fact of him - but he doesn’t, not reclining like a fat housecat. He looks at her the way all the noble men do and she has no patience for it. “I’m looking for someone.” A man in black.

With borrowed nonchalance she shakes her head, and hardly a wisp of her severely-short mane moves. The scarlet collar is a familiar texture around her throat, a comfortable embrace. With a thought to the prayers sewn there - bravery, honesty - she steps further out into the arena, and nearer to the stranger.



@Veer

“Do not be afraid to bare your teeth -”

Her gaze had been hawk-keen on her surroundings, the crude benches carved from canyon stone, the still and dust-dry arena. But the barest flicker of movement draws her eye, and she watches as the gilded stranger rises.

Elif is glad, then, for the unnatural cold, for it gives her a reason for the breath to stick in her throat, to burn like ice when at last she inhales. It is nervousness that has her falling so still (save for her blood, hot hot hot beneath her skin, and the bird-fast beat of her heart) but not the kind that is hand in hand with fear. It is the nervousness of when she was a girl taking her first dare, the nervousness of fly higher, fall faster. The kind that made her eyes shine, vivid green as spring.

He moves solid and grand as she moves light and quick as sunlight on water; he moves like her shadow, stretched too tall by a low son.

But Elif stops dead when he calls her a liar.

“I am not.” And she looks down her nose at him, though he towers above her, dark and forbidding as a dust-storm on the horizon. She does not care how big he is, how cruel the slash of his mouth or how gleaming his gold. “You know nothing of me, to tell me what I am.” Her eyes gleam in the slant of sunlight that filters in, now he is not blocking it with his wings; his own gaze is hooded, dark as thick amber. Still she does not shy away from it; it is not fear she trembles with, high-strung as a racehorse with the wind in her blood.

A wind that blows toward her like a caress as he arches his wings up and up, as if he might close her in. As if he could capture her with feathers and threats like she was nothing more than a songbird, rare and frail in the desert.

She is about to challenge him, then, but the wind loves her, and it warns her. Here in this pit where little breeze should stir it brings her a scent other than his own (which is unsettling enough, blood thick as ichor and rich warm gold). A scent that is half-cat and half-eagle and all predator, and only then does Elif breathe in the sharp and bitter tang of fear and flick her eyes skyward - only for a moment, but long enough to judge the time it would take her to rise up and up beyond the cliff-face.

Elif is certain she is faster than this stallion, but she is not sure about the thing that waits behind him, breathing softly as an eagle, as a cat.  

His shadow falls across her; her gaze cuts back to his face. She does not look at the smile he wears (not unlike a lion itself, utterly content in its power), and she laughs at his next words. It comes as a surprise, that rush of sound, but it emboldens her too. She snaps her tail against her hocks and tilts her head at him, as if he is only another thing at market to be bought.

“Men like you never help for free.” She says it evenly, matter-of-fact, but there is already a dare beginning in her eyes. It is too easy for her to forget the beast at his back.

Who are you, she should ask then, and who is your friend?

“What is your price?” she asks instead, and the wind sighs in her ear, and dies away.



@Veer

“Do not be afraid to bare your teeth -”

the divine beasts
' Hardly has the universe stretched its wings to span '


“Don't I?” He says between flashes of pearl teeth, as if the wealth on the words lives only in the broad slash of his smile and the redness of his tongue. Part of him wants lean forward to whisper in her ear, until his voice is her thoughts and all her own are dead and gone and forgotten. He could lick words across her brow, sing to her blood that he knows it, knows what darkness is genetic and what is nurtured.

Veer wants to nurture that darkness in her blood, to feed it like a flame until it consumes and then recreates. She could be more---

Elif could be like her brother (or at least as glorious as how her name sounded on a dying monster's tongue). Veer felt as if it was a prophecy, the sound of her, when he lowered his bloody teeth to the stallion and tore out his throat on the last syllable of her name. Elif, he wants to whisper, there is so much of your blood that I know. Instead he only catches the fearful flick of her eyes and all the awful things he could say die.

Only silence and the sounds of them live in that space and in that space he silently speaks to his monster. Soon, Najjad, soon. And his monster says nothing back, nothing more than a flash of feeling in which Veer knows they are both ready, ready, ready.

Veer moves past her then and his lips vibrate in a hum like a lion pondering what to do about the approaching jackals. Every movement he makes is lazy, and he lets his wings brush close enough to touch her, close enough that their feathers might caress, golden sun to dark, desert sand. “Does the price matter?” He asks between the soft chime of his golden chains that reflect the sun like diamonds might.

Najjad moves closer as Veer talks. His talons tap against the stone and his beak clacks together as if he anticipates the meal to come, the feast of a Pegasus. Veer can feel the gryhon's amusement in that steel channel of thoughts between them, he can feel that the beasts belly is already full and he only wants to slumber in the darkness.

But still, Veer is careful to let his breath sigh out in fear and his forces his  heart to beat a little faster. His wings flare out wildly, as if he's they prey caught before the predator. He's also just as careful to let his steps move a little faster until he's between the mare and the door as if he's planning to run and leave her to deal with the creature alone.

“We should run,” His words are almost frantic and his wings shift in a frenzy at his side and the pitch of his chain-song grows rabid. “Or perhaps fight, but I do not think I could take him alone, not if a nest has been built here.” There will be time for bargains later, his fear seems to silently say in the white-rimmed panic of his gaze, there is only living now.

All the while Veer moves back, back, back to the single, tunnel out and Najjad (who looks very wild and hungry) spreads wide his massive wings, screeches out a roar, and begins to fly towards them.