The BEST revenge... is to stay fabulous.

The Illuminated

“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”

There is something about the young spring and the grass just stretching up through the last of the snow that makes her feel a little wild. The coolness almost burns in her lungs, like fire and soot, when she dances down the shoreline and inhales the briny holy air. She inhales like her lungs are a desperate and dying organ, like they are not blooming inside her chest in pink roses heady with youth. But maybe, as she runs, and the ocean stretches desolate around her, she feels in it her bones, the way each step she takes is another cell of this mortal body is dying. And maybe that's why she running like the hounds of hell are nipping at her heels and frothing rabid at the black streak of her shadow.

And maybe, maybe, she really is nothing more than a desperate girl running down the empty beach.

Al'Zahra blinks away the sand clinging in the corners of her eyes like diamond dust tears. She blinks because the beach is still empty, and the strange bridge is still looming under the weight of lambs across the horizon. She blinks like a lion, like a bit of smoke older than the world. No matter how much she blinks there is still only the sand, the bridge, the horizon and the reckless itch running down her spine like a storm.

The bridge and all its magic holds nothing new for her. This world holds nothing new, nothing dangerous. And, oh, oh, oh, she's longing for the thrill of fear to make her cells forget that they are dying, and dying, and dying in this cage of flesh and bone.

She runs into the sea because she wants to feel as alive as possible. She wants a garden of ice to bloom across her skin like she's glass instead of red blood. She wants winter to creep across her singing golden chains; she wants to make snow when she dances and flakes off all the coldness from her skin like trees shedding the summer.

When she comes across him she's still running in the tides. The forth is eating up her hoof prints like a great and endless snake. She almost doesn't slow down, she almost runs past him like he is nothing more than another shark in the shallow sea that means nothing to her. Her running slows to a walk and as she looks at him she can't pinpoint the reason why she stops.

Nor can she decide what it is that makes her curl her neck like a doe and smile. Yet she knows exactly what it is that makes her say, “Shouldn't you be down the shore crossing the bridge down the shore?”. And she knows what it is that makes her swallow the words, with all the other lambs, down like spun sugar. It is nothing kind, nothing as soft and pretty as the gold shining like a hundred suns across her bay coat.

That great beast of recklessness and life roars deep in her chest and it almost drowns out the sound of the sea.