It’s too early for the Scarab to have opened its doors, but it’s not (it is never) too early for revelry in the Night Markets. 

August isn’t even sure what they’re celebrating. Maybe the beginning of autumn, when the days are long enough for the bonfires to be more than symbol and habit. Likely Raum’s death, news of which has only just broken over the continent like a swallowing wave. Or maybe just because it’s a day that ends in y. 

He ought to be in more of a festive mood. All those things were cause for rejoicing, as is the simple fact that he and his friends are alive (after the latter events of the island, that feels like nothing so much as pure dumb luck). But many wheels are now in motion - kings dying, kings vanishing, rumors of Solis calling the worthy to vie for the Solterran crown - and the idea of rest is laughable. Even his usual methods of burning off steam are unavailable until the ground feels solid underfoot again. 

It’s been a long, long time since August has been the praying type, but he pauses as he passes by Caligo’s moon-sigil. Briefly he presses his lips to the cool gemstones at the center, tonight reflecting the waning moon overhead, but he feels no less uneasy when he straightens and moves on. 

What he needs - well, what he wants - is a drink, or a fight, or any kind of diversion that doesn’t smell like apocalypse and will leave him exhausted in body, not soul. What he wants is six hours of uninterrupted sleep. Instead he gets to play watchman for another night of Denocte’s unending revelry. 

There’s a whiff of salt on the air from the harbor, but it’s lost to woodsmoke and a hundred kinds of spices as soon as he turns down one of the more crowded streets. The sound is just as chaotic; sellers raise their voices over the shifting sounds of the crowd. Somewhere, someone is playing a tambourine; August side-steps a few young mares who are shimmying with the music, hardly sparing them a glance. 

When he closes his eyes, even brief enough to blink, the noise of the crowd transmutes to the chaos of the island, and he shakes his head and sets his jaw. That’s when a glimpse of shimmering-gold hide a few stalls down makes him jerk his head up, searching for the glint of a choker, the track of a scar - 

but it’s just another girl in a city of them. The only butterflies are in his stomach, and it’s high time for a drink to drown them.  

August - -

there's a lover in the story
but the story's still the same

The Illuminated

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

It is, perhaps, the last truly warm night of the season. The fires are roaring alongside her shadow like beasts waking up from some great slumber. Smoke is rising between the dragons ever grasping gemstones and bits of stolen gold in their claws. Fire catches on the glitz over and over again until the space above her head, in the black, looks more like a storm of falling stars than a night lit only by a dying moon.

All of it-- the fire, the glimmering not-stars, the smoke, the heat that's almost too hot-- makes her feel like a pagan. Her steps are doe-light as she dances and dances and dances until her sides are briny and as white frothed as a wave. The crowd and the other girls dancing like fairies around the golden, hot space of her are a welcome press of mortality.

Each time she feels their skin her heart races. Every time one pauses, just long enough, to look her in the eye like lions looking at the wold among them she trembles as finely as dew in the wind.

Oh she feels alive!

And reckless, and dangerous, and like a wolf who knows the winter is coming and the rabbits are fading as quick as the leaves.

For hours she dances like a bohemian, dreaming doe. Between the girls she dances, brushing close enough to startle them when they all pause to look too long at the boys guarding them ferociously. Her neck curls playfully when a lyre starts to cry. The gold around her ankles and her shoulder sings a sad note when a poet opens their mouth to rain out sorrow. She twists and sways to the lyre and the lyrics until her own throat aches with a hundred emotions she's almost forgotten how to feel.

It's not until a lull in the music that she realizes a desert has long since grown in her throat. She turns towards the merchants and the further back crowd that hasn't yet lost themselves to hedonism. It's the spirit seller that catches her eye first, he's just wild enough to look like he's stolen his wares from the belly of the mountain. Wild enough to make her wonder.

But then she spots the golden stallion, pale enough to be sand and dapples like he's standing in the forest instead of between fires, smokes, and so many bodies. She moves towards him, steady as a predator, with nothing more than her singing gold and frothed sides to suggest she is the wildest one in the crowd.

As wild the wind, even. More wild, surely, than the fires that keep only to their coal bottomed pits.

Al'Zahra smiles even though her throat is still screaming for something cold. And when she says, “hello.”, the sound of her voice is raw and rusted enough to be more a midnight promise than a greeting.

The darkness is growing and so, too, is the revel.

It’s going to be one of those nights, he thinks, where hedonism toes the line with violence. Where eyes glossy with drink and dance begin to gleam with sundown thoughts. Where the thrill of the revel twines around hearts like choking vines and coaxes more, more, more. There is nowhere better at such nights than the starlit city of Denocte, court of darkness, court of dreams.

August does not blame them for it. Why not, on this night with a grave-cold chill to the air, with the candles lit for the dead, give themselves over to something more than living? For now their blood is quick and warm and their feet move along to a river of music; for now there is fucking and fighting and drinking, all the things that cry out to the world I live, I live, I live.

Oh, how he wants to join them. But his heartbeat is too slow, his blood cold beneath the moon-brushed gold of his coat. The line ahead of him to the spirit-seller shortens and August turns, just as the woman pushes forward from the crowd.

It’s the closeness of her voice that catches him, the low smoke of it. He turns back to watch her close the space between them and his lips are already curving even as his mind whispers trouble at the way she moves like a lioness, the way the firelight turns her bay hide to bronze, the way sweat froths her shoulders and chest. The gold she wears catches in the light like rivers of fire, like the sun melted down, like a wink and a promise. It is not the gold he was looking for -

But August decides he isn’t picky. And he likes the way she smells, beneath the bonfire-smoke and the incense and the night-blooming jasmine - like sweat, like the wild places of the mountains, like herself. Something not polished to a shine and scrubbed clean and pretending.

“Hello,” he replies, low, and the silver of his eyes meets the gold of hers. “You look like a girl from a story, who puts on fairy-shoes and can’t stop dancing.” Until she dies, he does not add. August says it like he’s impressed, and maybe a little longing.

Then the merchant is clearing his throat, and the golden stallion nods toward him, though his gaze does not stray from the bright burn of hers. “What’s your pleasure?” Of course he means a drink. But his expression says tell me anything. 

August - -

there's a lover in the story
but the story's still the same

The Illuminated

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

There is a song that wants singing. It's in the notes of cracking fire, the whispered notes between hair and flesh, and the yelling merchant's treble twining like ink between the two. The song is laying itself slow over her skin somewhere between the promise of fire and the chill of sweat cooling in the blackness. She shivers at the feel of it, each note a slow-burn touch,  and when he turns his eyes and the song beds down in the warmth of her marrow.

And maybe that song that wants singing wants something more too, something between that line of violence and love.

“I haven't heard that one yet.” She presses closer to him when another horse passes too close by her hip. When she tilts her head to watch his smile blaze like a solar flare her own eyes shine like a comet streaking through the sunrise. Their shoulders almost touch when she steps closer. If there is a heavy sigh from the line behind them she does not listen to it (although something god-like in her catches and roars). “But I'm glad I remind you of a story.” And it's there in her look, that she knows more than any young mare should, more than any god perched up high like a sun in the clouds. It's an ancient look and it's the way boys and girls have been looking at each other since the beginning of the mortal coil.

He doesn't look away towards the waiting merchant and she follows his lead. Her chains sing part of that song that still wants singing when she steps closer to the table, close enough that the lantern-light makes her gold seem like links of diamonds pulled down from the stars. The smile curling sickle bright  through her lips darkens in that wavering light. “Surprise me.” If his voice has other things hidden in all that moon-silver rasping so does her.

But instead of things like anything, the curl of her voice sighs like a sword being pulled free. Maybe that's always been the song, the sigh of metal and flesh and wicked revels beneath the forgiving eyes of the constellations.

I haven’t heard that one yet she says, and oh, he wants to tell her she’s better off not knowing. There were so many stories of girls slipping away, doing what they oughtn’t for a taste, a touch of pleasure, and getting much more than what they bargained for. He’s never thought before how they don’t tell boys the same things, as though they have nothing to fear from the things they want. As though there are no consequences for their tastes.

But of course the wolves (or the witches, or the fae, or wicked king or god himself) don’t give a shit if their victim is a boy or a girl. They’re just starving. They’re just playing their part.

August is sick of playing his own. So when she slips closer to him he leans toward her just-so, just enough that their shoulders whisper together, gold to rich dark brown. There is a look in her eye that he knows well, and firelight flickers in the triangle that rests on the smooth plane of her forehead; he can almost make out his own expression in it. That’s when he turns away. “There are better endings than that one has,” he says to the night, to the smoke that drifts like an offering up to the moon; he wonders if their god is listening. He doesn’t want to think of Caligo, either, possibly ever again. Had he pressed a kiss, a prayer, to her cold stones only a quarter-hour ago? It seems unthinkable now; it makes something else begin to unwind inside him, like he is a creature bound up by strings and one by one they’re being snipped.

August says to the merchant, “Two of the strongest thing you’ve got.” His gaze is level, and so is his tone; both have a dark undercurrent, a little of what’s carried on the air tonight. Maybe that’s the reason the stallion doesn’t smile or roll his eyes or smirk at the two young horses whose eyes glint fever-bright. As he pours two tumblers half-full with something deep and rich August watches him, the autumn air cold on his cheek, the curve of his shoulder and hip warm where it almost-but-does-not touch the dancer’s. He doesn’t need the liquor, he already feels like he’s burning - except for his head, his thoughts, anchored like barnacles or manacles. He pays, turns away, offers a glass to the stranger and lifts his own. Firelight seems to live somewhere within it, shifting the colors, amber-caramel-gold.

“What shall we toast?” he asks. His pulse is feathering in his throat; he can’t seem to stop watching the light flicker and slide up and down the delicate links of her chain. “And then I would like to steal you,” back to her eyes, the knowing gold of them, a smile uncurling on his mouth, “for a dance.”

August does not add if you will let me. It isn't really a question.

August - -

there's a lover in the story
but the story's still the same

The Illuminated

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

Al'Zahra does not turn away as he does. She does not watch the merchant pour golden poison into a glass. Her gaze settles, on all his banked fire, on the curl of his neck, the way he speaks like smoke and looks like a young war. There is something in him, she thinks, that is still chained and tethered in the belly of the earth. Morrighan had the same look, a rose promising to turn into a thorn bush.

She loves the way he wears it. And she loves the way that she can press her lips to his ear and imagine she's digging a hole in the earth. “I will have to discover them all then.” The way she presses her shoulder to his, the way she leans against him, makes it seems impossible that she said I instead of we. It makes it seem like she's debating stealing all the endings from the center of his heart where they might be hiding.

He raises his glass, and the smile she lets cross her face as she holds her own, is a wicked svelte look. There are a hundred promises in the way she flashes her teeth like only lions and wolves do. It's a look bred for midsummer night gardens where pagans lay entangled on sheets of gold. Her soul is too old to be innocent and her young form is too ravenous to be delicate. “To finding the first ending.” She says with barely a pause between the arch of her smile and the end of her sooty voice.

The drink is gone in one swallow.

The liquor burns like molten gold. Her stomach, her blood, her lust revels in the sensations. And if he doesn't revel in the sensation too, she decides that she will make him the moment he talks about stealing from her. The girl part of her trembles. The lion roars. The god looks at him and sees only flesh and bone instead of beauty. All the parts of her stare at him.. wondering.

She smiles and presses their lips together, breathing deep of the smoke the drink has left on his lips. There she says, “yes,” between the smoke and skin like he asked her instead of demanded. But in her eyes, when she pulls back and starts to tremble like she's already dissolving into dance, promises that there is only one of them who will be stealing tonight.

Only one.  

There is something about the way she watches him that feels as physical as a hand along his neck. August wants to arch into it like a cat. He has always liked having eyes on him, or being touched - it reminds him that he is real. Only lately has it begun to bother him that he’s lost track of all of the names.

Ordinarily he would be as lazy as the smoke that curls up above the streets. He might play demure, he might ask more questions. Ordinarily it was a game.

But there is that fire in his belly, burning since the island. There is that buzz in his head, a peculiar kind of white noise, a snatch of melody from a bird that shouldn’t exist. There is this woman, with her lioness’s eyes and her long braided hair and the gold that winks at him in the cool dark. August can’t say why her gaze makes him feel chosen, a shepherd picked to be king. Maybe it doesn’t matter; he’s happy to worship.

It’s hard to keep his mouth from her when she talks low into his ear. A shiver uncurls along his neck like a new fern; he wants to return the gesture with his teeth. She is hot and sleek from dancing and now nothing could make him look away from her. That wicked, bold smile snares him, so satisfied he feels already bare; he lowers his lashes at her toast.

And drinks.

The heat flares out from his belly, trails down his throat. It is nothing to the warmth where their shoulders meet, their sides. Before he can look up again her lips are on his; they taste the same way, smoke and embers.

It isn’t enough. Now he is only more ravenous, eager to forget everything but her taste. As she pulls away he decides he no longer wants to dance, to be around the others; he almost suggests they skip to that ending. But her eyes, as she begins to shiver and her chains whisper light over her skin, convince him not to. He is willing to burn a little longer for the way she looks at him.

Roughly he sets the glass down, his gaze not straying from hers. He walks a half-circle around her, watching her move, the cool of the night one one side and the heat of the stranger on the other. August glances his lips across her hip, her shoulder, and up to her ear. He lets his teeth ghost a touch along its soft curve. “Why don’t you lead,” he murmurs, “for now.” What he doesn’t say is that he doesn’t even want to think. For the rest of the night he only wants to feel.

August - -

there's a lover in the story
but the story's still the same

The Illuminated

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

The air starts to feel charged against her skin. There is a storm about to break against the reckless, wanting shores of them. It has been so long, too long, since she remembered how it felt to made of only smoke, fire and magic. This feels like unfolding, like changing between forms so fast that it makes her feels dizzy. This feels like becoming.

Once she destroyed men bolder than him with their own desires, their own wishes. Even trapped, she had been a wolf in waiting, a lion in the tall-grass, a monster determined to take her freedom in drops of blood until the world drowned for her.

But it's his heartbeat that echoes in her chest when he traces a line down the outside of her ear. It's a lover's touch, bold enough that she should turn to him and take back all the desire raging in her by force. For a year she has been a mortal dancer, instead of a jinn, and no one has been brave enough to touch her like this. Not even when she welcomed it. Maybe they saw the wolf in her gaze, the danger in her form, the promise of consumption instead of wanting.

Maybe he is only the first fool she's tried to sweep away. Or maybe she's the fool for trembling at his touch, for taking his heartbeat into her own chest, for wanting to dissolve into him instead of into dance.

She shakes her head so that her chains sing a siren song against her skin. They touch her in all the places she's thinking about his teeth and his heart. The song and the crowd pressing in around them grows wild. There are drums beating low, and everything about the sound reminds her of how it felt to be the possibility of everything. “I could lead forever.”She winks and it has nothing to do with humor and everything with boldness.  And when she pulls at his mane, with teeth more than lip, it's with a promise in her eyes that for tonight she might let him be anything, be everything, or be nothing more than the heartbeat humming like a wildfire beneath her chest.

Someone else scrapes a touch along her rib-cage as she drags him into the crowd like a lioness dragging home her kill. But that touch does not make all her edges want to dissolve. And it's dissolving that she does, when she curls her neck like a swan around his neck and starts to burn.

Al'Zahra does not race for the ending. She savors the story and smoke of it.

Maybe August is looking for wolves. Ever since the island, ever since something judged him not enough to win but not enough to die, it feels like he’s been waiting for teeth around his neck. Any noose would do, anything that made his heart kick a little quicker in his chest. The simple daily business of the Scarab (the simple daily business of living) had ceased to be enough. There was only boredom when he played his role, only hollowness each morning when he woke from fitful sleep, only worry that gnawed through his gut and up toward his heart when he looked at Aghavni, who every day seemed a little further away.

He still doesn’t know he’s found one now. Fire, sure - fire that echoed in his belly where that unnamed drink pooled, fire that licked up his skin like salt-cured waves devouring a golden beach. Fire he wanted more of, wanted to scald himself in, wanted to burn his fingerprints off and start over or be consumed entirely.

The music goes shivering higher, faster, frantic. The crowd follows, blurs into nothing but background noise. The clamor of the stranger’s chains makes August think of coins endlessly falling into a chest that’s never full and each piece of ringing gold cries more more more instead of less. There’s never enough of anything. And oh, he is tired of feeling that way.

I could lead forever, she says, and a glorious shiver wends down his back at that, and he dutifully follows (the way he always has), relishing the small-pain from the pull on his mane. The crowd welcomes them, skin and bone on all sides, a feast of it beneath the drums; there is almost no room to dance, only to sway and to step and most of all to press against each other like the pages of a closed book, unread and unending. It feels like melting, where they touch, like dissolving; he wonders what the base parts of himself are, what pure thing he might be made into, if this night, this dance, this consuming fire could last forever.

It is tempting (and he is tempted, and his teeth are at the base of her neck and they are not gentle, and his chest is against her chest but he can only feel his own heartbeat, fast and wanting enough to make him ache) but it isn’t any different, really, than the rest of his life. Always following. It doesn’t matter what decisions you make when they belong to someone else.

“I’m leaving,” he says then, his voice husky as bonfire smoke, “in the morning. I’m sailing away,” and he is surprised to find it certain and true, the first thing he has really chosen in his life. He does not think about the consequences when he leans in close to this woman of fire-and-gold whose name he doesn’t know, doesn’t really care to know. “Until then I’m yours,” he whispers into the cusp of her ear, and when he curves his head away his throat glistens, bare gold, like he’s begging her to seize it, and consume him to the bones.

August - -

there's a lover in the story
but the story's still the same

The Illuminated

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

If there are not scars hidden in the sweat-kissed glimmer of his dapples there will be. And if there are not kisses etched into his skin, like the marks of tooth and claw, there will be those too. Because with each inch of her that dissolves into dance, and opiate-like liquor, and lust blazing across her bones like molten gold instead of blood--

Because with each inch of her dissolves fire starts to shine through, like light through the blackness of a dead tree struck by a storm.

Al'Zahra is burning, burning, burning. Her words are embers cast into the new-scar-kisses she's carving into his flesh like hooks into scale. “To tonight then.” She says the words like his skin is a god, and she's the altar fat with fruit and gold. She says the words like they are more claws than kisses, more rage than lust, and want, and possession.

There is nothing in her that cares about tomorrow, or his name, or wherever it is he is sailing too. Wolves do no care for the den in the summer; they care only for the tall grass full of sleeping fawn. It's a wolf that lays her teeth against his throat when he begs her too like a fool. It's a wolf that bites down and calls it a kiss.

And it's a predator that drags him into the crowd, and the dance, and the place where the fire is close enough to singe. Like a wolf, like a lion, like a god, she keeps her teeth at his throat and does not wait for privacy before she drags him closer, and closer, and closer to oblivion.