the great object of life is sensation -
to feel that we exist, even though in pain

♠︎ ♕ ♠︎



It becomes quickly apparent that neither he nor his new companion are familiar with the city’s layout. 

The main marketplace stretches a half-mile down a wide corridor, draped with colored silk canopies and paper lanterns, each dead-end alleyway stuffed with more goods. Their shadows slim and lengthen, the crowds begin to thin, and still there is no sign of their quarry. August tries not to be irritated at the near-miss, but he keeps remembering the way the stallion had turned back to look, the gold of his eye catching in the light - he would recognize August if he’d seen him, he is sure. And if he had it’s possible they are not the only ones doing the hunting, and at a disadvantage. 

If he were home he would have no trouble asking merchants and shoppers alike for help. Here he trusts none of them, and from the slide of their eyes as the pair passes it is mutual. Anyway, he doesn’t know what he’s looking for. 

Now they stand at the southeastern edge of the city, near enough the docks and the shoreline to hear the clamoring gulls, near enough the desert to see how the light has turned to rose gold over the dunes. The path before them forks, the left into shadow and the right in sun. August’s patience for this task is frayed; he watches a scrawny cat leap after fat pigeons and turns to Warset with a shake of his head.  Something about the look in her eyes, the set of her mouth, makes him feel like more of a disappointment. He’d rather have her teeth on his hip again. “Care to pick a path?” 

the great object of life is sensation -
to feel that we exist, even though in pain

♠︎ ♕ ♠︎



What a mystery she is, this girl of few words who offers her help but no information of herself. Her silence allows August to fill in the gaps for her - who she is, where she came from, why she’s bothering to help a stranger track a stranger. But the palomino’s imagination is proving as fickle as the rest of him, lately, always changing the story. She wears that collar of diamond and ruby because she is high-born, or because she is a thief. She is helping him because she is a spy, or entranced by the determination in his eye and the careful pattern of dapples on his golden skin. She will threaten him at the end of this - she has a secret of her own.

Of course he has no idea how close this last guess is. He lets the whole game go, anyway, just watching her decide with the evening light stretching her shadow longer behind her, making her seem to glow like a star. When he feels her tremble he presses more firmly against her, and then withdraws.

“Good choice,” he says, if only to break the quiet. His expression doesn’t change as she steps ahead of him; it is smooth as a windless lake. When he follows, it isn’t Warset he watches but the huddled structures around them, homes with the shutters closed and interiors dark. It isn’t hard to wonder how many of them are empty, or have lost members to starvation or stone, victims of the rule of the previous king. It isn’t hard to wonder how many of them might feel skeptical of the current rule. August wonders what keeps them in the desert with nothing between their teeth but the grit of sand.

It is cooler in the dark. August keeps close to the pegasus as they leave half-moons in the dust, and when he catches her eye it gleams like a cat’s. “Where do you come from, Warset?” he asks, just to keep the silence at bay.

the great object of life is sensation -
to feel that we exist, even though in pain

♠︎ ♕ ♠︎



For August touch has always been a kind of tool - something only rarely used without calculation or motive. Even among his friends (and those friends were as good as family) they were all guarded in some way, spending gestures like nose-to-cheek like currency. Even when he’d broken from the Scarab, when he sought the press or teeth of another for pleasure and not payment, he knew the impulse was a selfish one.

So it is strange, to be touched by Warset so carelessly. He wonders what she wants, and why she’d agreed so quickly to help him. He welcomes the warmth when her wing spreads over his back, like a mother; he tells himself he won’t miss it when it’s gone. August knew, intellectually, that the desert got cold at night (how quickly Solis turns his face away), but he is still surprised by the chill. The walls, the sand, they all try to hold the heat in as long as they can, but the sun is gone now.

When she stops he does too; his heart skips quicker at the touch of her nose. August wants to look at her but lets her guide head up, where the sky is a deepening lake, and the stars are emerging. It takes him a moment, staring at that distant point of light, to understand what she’s saying. Then he does look at her, surprised, but all her strangeness starts to make sense because -

“You’re one of the shed-stars,” he says, his voice soft and round with wonder, and if he is wrong there is no time for her to correct him.

The sharp slap of the door draws both their attention, and when the stallion steps out August stiffens like an eager hound. He recognizes that silhouette, or at least wants too badly enough that it doesn’t matter. There is something familiar about the rage that flickers between them when the tiger’s-eyes meet his own, just for a moment. He swears he sees the man sneer -

Things happen very quickly, then. There is a flurry of movement that makes August shiver and shy like a racehorse at the gate, but what he sees, smudged by shadow, makes no sense to his adrenaline-surging mind. Warset is gone; there is a jungle-cat in her place, a deeper black than the rest of the night, and their quarry is running, a sudden drumbeat that echoes in his bloodstream.

August’s instincts tell him to flee, too, from that snarling predator, and have not quite accepted that the girl has become the beast; still, when his mind grasps for other explanations it comes up empty. And there is no time. So he just gnashes his teeth together and cries ”catch him”, then gathers his hindquarters and launches after the other stallion. As he plunges into the darkness, he only hopes not to feel claws sink into his own flesh.

the great object of life is sensation -
to feel that we exist, even though in pain

♠︎ ♕ ♠︎



August is in over his head. He knows it, even if there’s no time to think about it; for all the delicate situations he’s seen as part of the Scarab family, he has no experience to compare to racing pell-mell down a dark foreign street after a dangerous man and a girl who’d just turned into a panther. (Later, he’d think of how all his ‘adventures’ in Solterra felt like the stuff of dreams, terrifying and exhilarating and strange, only the consequences never faded when he woke).

But for now there is only trying to keep up, trying not to stumble when there’s a dip beneath his feet, trying to be aware of any other heads poking out of doors to identify the thunder of hooves, the roar of a wildcat. The sandstone walls feel close, claustrophobic; but for the strip of starlight overhead he could be back on the island, back in the not-cave, back with blood-substance raining down and the relic waiting like a heart at the center of it all. This has the same tilted, unreal feel to it.

His thoughts skip the tricky question of what he just saw Warset become in favor of the hunt. It’s a relief to feel anger start to burn him up at the edges like a piece of paper touched to a candle; he welcomes it, thinks of the man with his blade lifted toward Aghavni, his scarf around her neck. In this way he battles the chaos, and so by the time the creature that was Warset sends the stallion tumbling with a terrible sound and a worse cry, by the time August clatters to a stop a few feet away, he is settling into a killing-calm.

Still, his heart is a drum it feels like he’s shouting over, even though his actual voice is low and urgent when he drops his head to be level with the tiger-eyes of the other man. “Who are you with? Why did you threaten Aghavni?" There is no vocal answer, only a baring of teeth, a glare of white-rimmed eyes, before the stallion thrashes like a fish. He is making a terrible racket; it won’t be long before they have company, and while August has no doubt that panther-Warset can take care of herself he is not so sure.

“Fuck you,” the chestnut snarls, “and fuck house Hajakha-” he kicks out again, and the palomino leaps back, his gaze flicking to the panther’s, pale flashing eyes like stars above the collar she wears. From behind them there is shouting, and the sound of doors opening, and the dim glow of torches. They have very little time.

August jerks his head in a nod. He doesn’t know what he’s asking - both kill him and let him go - and his conscience says how awful, how awful to make her decide.

the great object of life is sensation -
to feel that we exist, even though in pain

♠︎ ♕ ♠︎



If he never realizes how badly he failed her on this night, he will be lucky.

As it stands, the guilt will begin to gnaw at him the moment his adrenaline wears off and he’s far from here, his heartbeat quieted, and alone. The shame will come later, the next morning, settling low in his belly like a rough lump of coal. Both will grow the more he thinks about them, and Warset, and the things that happened at the fringes of the desert that night.

But for now there is neither. There is the pound of his heart, a god’s gallop against his ribcage, and the wheezing sound of air moving through the stallion’s punctured throat, and a snarl from the leopard-that-was-Warset that sounds almost liquid. There is the sight of her, dragging the chestnut by the throat further into the shadows, his hooves still kicking up sand and dust. All of his senses seem clearer, as though they’d been fogged before and are suddenly clean for the first time.

And what does he do with these marvelous senses, all his blood prickling his veins?

He runs.

Because as she purrs and bends low over the other man’s neck, there are cries rising up from behind them. First they’re questions, and then shouts, and August is too recognizable, and has not made himself a friend of the king. So he flees, out of the alley and into the wind, his ears turned behind him to listen (as though he could hear anything over the sound of his own surging hooves, his own thundering heart).

When he slows down enough to feel anything other than alive, it is sick satisfaction at the thought of that bastard who’d threatened Aghavni caught between the jaws of a predator. It’s possible that the crowd had separated them, that he had survived, but August does not say a prayer for him. In a way it turned out lucky - now any investigations would be for a panther, not two horses. And everyone knew such predators were not unheard of in Novus. Even though he left without information, he isn’t sorry for what happened.

Not until he thinks of Warset, and wonders when she will become a girl again (one of the Shed Stars), and whether there will be someone’s blood in her belly when she does, does his own stomach begin to turn queasy. The change hadn’t hampered her at all; the big cat had not seemed distraught. And he was not worried about her ability to escape.

But it is a long night, after that.