|| I MET A TRAVELLER FROM AN ANTIQUE LAND WHO SAID: "TWO VAST AND TRUNKLESS LEGS OF STONE STAND IN THE DESERT... NEAR THEM, ON THE SAND, HALF SUNK, A SHATTERED VISAGE LIES, WHOSE FROWN, AND WRINKLED LIP, AND SNEER OF COLD COMMAND, TELL THAT ITS SCULPTOR WELL THOSE PASSIONS READ YET SURVIVE, STAMPED ON THESE LIFELESS THINGS, THE HAND THAT MOCKED THEM, AND THE HEART THAT FED: AND ON THE PEDESTAL THESE WORDS APPEAR: || 


I want to say there is no part of me that loves it.

My siblings judge me for it; they always have. Grief effects people differently, they say. The psychiatrist referred to it as complicated grief, as if by explaining it as “complicated” covers the broad range of realities it encompasses. What is grief, if not our worst habits manifested into the parts of ourselves with brandish with a smile? If I were ever to take the time and self-reflection to trace every nasty attribute of myself to the root, to delve deep into my motivations, my reasonings, and ask why… well what would I find if not the gnarled tangles of my childhood? What would I discover, if not white doves with their wings broken and the shocked face of my eldest brother?

I want to say there is no part of me that loves it.

I want to say the Ginseng tea and lavender oil have “healed” me of my ailment. I understand the error of violence; the misfortune it can bestow. I want to say I go to the pits for the gossip alone, to learn the from the underbelly what the cream of the crop refuses to discuss. I want to say all of these things; most of the time, I do. I lie even to myself. 

But today I can’t. 

Today I go to the pits to satisfy a hunger nothing else can sate. Perhaps it was the grieving of my youth; or perhaps it is insatiable because of my carnivore teeth. I never ask the question hard enough to find the answer. 

The location of the Pits often changes; the word is passed out through a complex system of notes and signs, and deciphering the result is half of my entertainment. The canyon mouth yawns at me as the sun sags low and tired on the horizon; Solis seems to wink there, in the distance, before turning the sky the colour of blood.

Elatus is full of bends and passageways, some underground, that are difficult to navigate. The only reason I have become adept is frequent passage; there is a part of me that relishes the idea it sets me apart, it makes me special, this ability to navigate the world outside of our Ieshan household. The estate that has made us soft. The estate that has spoon-fed us power and nobility, but no strength of substance, no cunning of worth. I find that only here, when the blood spits on the sand and arcs of it paint the walls like sacrilegious offerings. What would Adonai think of this artwork, I wonder.

It is night by the time I find the Pits. Rommel stands at the opening of this particularly arroyo; he is a stallion of impressive stature and observation. I have found his eyes on me many times when I did not expect it; my behaviour improves for him in a way it does for few authority figures. The corner of my mouth twitches. I almost smile, but he knows the reason I do not and smiles for me instead. “Prince, you’ve b’n’away fer far’t’long. Get yer ass in th’ring t'night, eh?” 

“Not tonight, gatekeeper. Perhaps next time.” I do wink, and the gesture softens him to laugh more boisterously. He takes my coin and ushers me “inside.”

The Pit tonight is hardly impressive. It is merely an area of dead riverbed cleared of brush and surrounded with whatever brambles and bushes they could find tonight. They’ve cleared the land in a circle at least fifteen feet across each direction and stomped the brambles from it. A large crowd has already gathered and waits with quiet, intense anticipation. I breathe in the scent of Elatus at night, listen to the coyotes in the distance, feel apart of the sagebrush and growing chill. The lavender oil at my lips, at my ears, at my throats says be calm, be calm and I am anything but calm. The festivities begin later, when the last bit of light is gone from the sky. The Pits become a colourful array of men and women from different backgrounds, ethnicities, Courts—the diversity is refreshing, and strange, and I am drawn from the background to the forefront as the contestants battle for survival and coin.

There is always one fighter who stands out to me. I anticipate her battle tonight, with strange nervousness. 

This is a feeling I have crown accustomed with having, in regards to her. She does something to me I don't necessarily like, this girl. Something inexplicable. I do not love the fighters; I do not pity them; I do not admire them; I do not envy them. But this girl evokes all of these sentiments and more, with her red painted face and wings and aura of Solterra’s fierce, unrelenting rage. Her wings belong to a falcon; her movement to a tigress; her bloodlust to war itself. Not that I know anything much of these things, having always had the novelty to watch from afar, or read, or witness it from a spectator's place. 

I do not often bet, but tonight I do. I bet on her.

Her fight is brief and vicious; one of many. Then the Pits change slides; another battle ensues; another victory; another defeat. The nights go on and on like that, in this place of hell and triumph, and I never grow tired. My heart is in my throat and I am as endless as the desert; the dry scent of Elatus becomes wetted with blood, fear, anger. The dryness of the desert runs wet with crimson blood and I wonder if it will make something else grow after we have left this place, after it has become nothing save a forgotten arroyo again.

I do not know how many visits to the canyon and to the fights it has taken me to work up the courage to talk to this fighter; too many. I build the courage throughout the night, waiting for the opportune time. I do not consciously seek her out as the stars wane and the dawn threatens the far sky; I do not consciously bump shoulders with the fighter of the Pits as the fighting itself devolves into something  more celebratory and less violent, a bonfire and bottles of liquor. 

But I do.

And perhaps in doing it, the action had been intended all along.

“Excuse me.” I say. A voice like honey, one of my sisters has said. Except sweet enough to kill. I clear my throat and meet her eyes. There is a slight twitch to the edge of my mouth, an almost smile, as I add, “You fight like no one I’ve ever seen before.” The compliment is hard to give, because it is not enough. 

"Speech." || @Amaunet 

my name is oxymandias, king of kings: look on my words, ye mighty, and despair!

nothing beside remains. round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.

“The forest rose like a dream
from the mind of Chaos’s lonely daughter
and the sun fell heavy and thick
to warm the blood of a world"


It has been hours since her battle, since the fall into violence and blood-lust, since the primordial affliction of violent hearts. It has been hours since her blood should have settled into nothing more than  iron and cells. But it hasn't. Amaunet is all humming magic, and bellowing need, and skin with lines of goosebumps traced across it like warpaint. Even now it is still driving her, that prowling restlessness of  the thing beneath her skin and glow.

She is freshly painted with more blood-red warpaint. There is the mark of teeth along her shoulder blade, a bloody kiss of lips smeared like sorrow down the fine lines of her cheek, there is a rainbow of gore swiped along the sinew of her hipbones. Other fighters wipe themselves clean of the filth and horror. But not her. She has always relished in the golden glory of her warpaint, of the way that she can taste the iron and wrath filling up her lungs on each exhale.

And on each inhale she's only breathing more violence into the crowd, more hunger, more need, and more, and more, and more. It's still not enough to settle her magic and the ebb the rush of adrenaline and whiskey though her racing, fire-filled veins.

She is an earthquake in the belly of the canyons, a roar of distant thunder.

She is destruction.

Malt and smoke are heavy on her tongue when the boy approaches. The heat of him is the first thing to press against her skin, all Solterran fire and banked agony. Her magic hums for the weight of him.

Amaunet hums for the flash of fang in his half-curl of his lip.

When she tosses her glass onto a nearby table the echo of it seems almost deafening in the pause between his greet and her response. And when she snaps her wings the pull of a bruise settles something wild that had risen in her at the sound of his voice.

Her wings have hardly settled when she turns to him. A distant thud of flesh and hoof runs another line of goosebumps down her spine. The smile she gives him is full of teeth, and fire, and everything that refuses to be banked in her form. “Because no one is like me.” Music rings out from her mane when the bands around her braids sing as she reaches out to brush a line of blood and malt down his cheek.

Half of her wonders if he'll pull away. The other half wonders about the rust in his honey voice.

A glow blooms across her skin like a golden blush.

“You did not fight tonight.” She says the words like the sharp kiss of a knife at the throat of a slumbering lion. There is judgment there, and fire, and a quiet knowing of the blood his teeth have tasted.

Because no one fights like her. No one could.

But she remembers the shine of his skin when he fell into the wrath slumbering beneath every inch of this desert sand and stone. And it's that man who she brushes against when she drags a wing down his side.


@Corradh

Corradh has always found reality to be sadly disappointing; he had spent months—perhaps even years—imagining his encounter with the striking, winged fighter. He had again and again told himself exactly how the exchange would transpire; Corradh had plotted out every possible conversation. All of these imagined encounters lay unspoken and unlived in his mind; the truth of it unfolds before him, both disappointing and beyond whatever he himself could have concocted. 

Because no one is like me. The audacious confidence with which she says it takes Corradh aback, and this is where whatever fantasies he’d had of who she is dissolve; he is left reeling in the aftershock of her words, as one does after any natural disaster. The colours seem a little brighter; the music louder than before. The flash-bright image of her smile engrains itself in his mind, more teeth than lips. Her touch, too, seems in and of itself to carry the power of a small inferno.

Corradh finds himself at a loss in the face of her confidence, if only because the Solterran aristocracy comes in one mould only. There are many like Corradh, and he knows it.

In contrast, she radiates danger and something nearly anarchist; her wings are a movement in and of themselves, unhurried and constant.

You did not fight tonight. The way she says it makes Corradh believe she knows he has fought, and does fight. There is judgement there, a type of scorn he is familiar with. He does not always fight not because he doesn’t want to, but because how it risks his reputation. That great and terrible wing brushes down his side; and Corradh smiles with all the dark things in the desert. He smiles in a way uncharacteristic; he shows his teeth.

“I did not,” Corradh confirms. And in confirming, his mind plunges down a deep and twisting tunnel: why, why, why he asks himself, disappointed in each and every answer. “Would you have watched me?” He asks it with an edge of daring. With the sun on the horizon and a sleepless night behind him, it does not seem like the time to be conservative. 

The edge in her voice has evoked him; Corradh dislikes being challenged, yet it has never been in his nature to be anything save coy. His eyes are emeralds when he says, his mouth just slightly too close to her throat, “And if we had fought?”


@Amaunet || "Speech." || 

until the lion learns to write

every story will glorify the hunter

"let us drink each other's blood in the night "


There are a thousands pieces of her that have almost forgotten they have existed at all. A bit of her heart blooms and flutters in her chest, soft as the butterfly wings of a young girl's heart when she looks at a boy with skin smooth and sleek as a leopard. There is a tremble in her wings, a bit of submission in the way they flicker and fold like stars into the atmosphere of her blushing glow. And each of their parts lament as they fall to the sea-bottom of her violence, hunger, and wrath.

Amaunet does not feel them as they go, not when he smiles with young and feral sort of grace. All her butterflies turn to wasps in spring (driven on by instinct and little else). She counts his teeth like scars.

One. Two. Three. Until the smile fades into words.

And it takes her a moment to gather up the wasps in her belly and the numbers falling through her thoughts like arrows, and spears, and suns caught in the moon-dark. And it takes her another second to mold his words into weapons caught tightly between her teeth when he swings them. “I've always watched you fight.” His weapons seem almost dull now-- dew dusted petals beneath the humming wasps. She misses the teeth, the tips of them, the why her blood is bellowing for the imagined sting of them.

Her blood is roaring when she bares her throat to the dark snarl of his smile. The pulse throbs there, in the shadow between her glow and his darkness (like two universes colliding in the vastness of space). Amaunet does not pause to wonder which gravitational pull will swallow them whole when she snaps her wings open into the silence like a solar flare. “If we had fought I would have laid my teeth against your throat. And I would not have relented until you begged mercy like a prayer to your god.” Above his teeth she smiles, and her laugh is more purr than amusement (more lust and promise than blood).

When she steps closer it's another crack in the silence existing only here in this the tight, weighted blackness between them. It's another challenge, another solar-flare and comet crash. It's another begging bit of poetry for all the things that their violence will not let their lips and hearts taste. It's another weapon held viciously between her aching teeth.

She does not pull the hollow of her throat away from his lips. “Would you like to know what power feels like? Or would you rather know what it tastes like?”

And even as she challenges him-- she prays.



"and betray each other in the sun."

Watching her makes him feel the same as the pause between a fight, between one blow and the next. It does not matter if the battle is a verbal or physical one; the anticipation for the next round, the next move, is the very thing Corradh is addicted to. He has always, always chased a life on the precipice if only because away from the marble decor, militant schedules, and artisan drapes is the only place he feels alive. The thing that lives within him, the spotted, sharp-toothed beast curls and uncurls. The panther flexes its claws in the meat of his heart, and the beat of his blood cries loud, loud, loud in his ears.

The anticipation for her answer is almost too much. It is almost unbearable. And he savours it the same way he savours too-sweet of figs, or the fleshiest, too-rich piece of steak or organ the cooks prepare specifically for him.

I’ve always watched you fight. 

She is missing his teeth and her words are an unexpected blow. Corradh relishes it, briefly, but already the moment is gone and bleeding into the next. She tosses her head, and bares her throat, and all he can think is how his mouth fits around nothing as perfectly as it does around the jugular, and how perhaps he could just show her the delicate magic of that symmetry—then she snaps her wings and steals his throat. 

“You mistake me for a man who prays to gods.” Corradh says and as he says it he smiles, too, but the flash is there and gone within the span of a heartbeat. “I would much rather pray to you.” Perhaps her audaciousness has spurred him, has inspired him, because the comment escapes him before Corradh can think better of it. 

Amaunet closes the space between them, so that the space that is left seems at once insurmountable and too close. His mouth feels dry with a strange nervousness, one Corradh is not accustomed to. She does not move her throat from his mouth. His lips draw back and he ghosts his teeth against her skin, close enough to touch the hairs but not close enough to touch her skin. It is he who draws away, almost teasingly. “I am not a man of afraid of extremes. I would rather know both, in due time.” 

His eyes are gleaming with all the mischief of a cat’s. Perhaps it is the anticipation of their interaction that has made him so bold; perhaps it is the simple fact that there is nothing disappointing in their meeting, nothing that suggests he had been wrong about her, and this unsettles him. Corradh is accustomed to being disappointed. In fact, he expects it.

“And you, Amaunet?” he whispers her name like a goddess’s, held reverently between tongue and tooth, savoured in a whisper that borders on husky. He knows it because he has listened for it. He knows it because he waits, with anticipation, for her battles. “Would you like to know what power feels like? Or what it tastes like?” He pauses. “Or, do you already know?” 

@Amaunet || "Speech." || 

until the lion learns to write

every story will glorify the hunter

And just

like

that

Amaunet becomes holy.

It takes no more than a blink of her eyes and a whisper scratch of his teeth against the tender hair of her throat for it to settle over her like a mantle. Beneath her skin it blooms in gold blush like blood rising to the surface of a young girl's cheeks. Her wings flare with the gravitational pull of a god and each of her feathers becomes a star caught in the cosmos of her. Sinew trembles and shivers like moonlight through a cloudy night as she presses hot and hungry against him.

She devours every inch of space he surrenders and it is still not enough to settle the holy shroud that has fallen across her.

It is not nearly enough.

Like snow she sinks knee deep into him. Her teeth bare themselves from between her smile and they clash against the space between a kiss of her lips and the steady drumbeat racing along the belly of his cheek. “Let us discover it together then.” She coos and only then, with her voice just-so against his cheek (like an almost kiss, or an almost threat), does she move to lay her lips against his crest.

Her wing snaps against his side in a lash that has nothing at all to do with violence and everything to do with that hunger still tracing arcane patterns behind her eyes each time she blinks against the shine of his reflection in them. He lives in that dark space like lighting, and starlight, and a solar flare. She pushes against him like thunder, like rain, like the sand reaching up to pool around their ankles here in the dark bottom of Solterra.

He tastes like fig, and silk, and gold and a hundred another flavors that she has no name for but mine.

Amaunet thinks she could live in the taste of him and never feel hollow again.

She languishes against him like a wildcat. She purrs. “And when you are bloated with power and fat with the taste of me,” her pause is almost breathless with all the things roiling in her in tangles of divine. “I will let you fall to your knees and pray.” She presses a kiss of flight-feathers against his hipbone as if she might soothe the ache of all her hunger nipping at every noble edge of his form.

Or as if she might show him how sweet mercy could be for him.

And there is no mistaking the glaring, golden shine of all the terrible things she knows in her eyes as she cuts her gaze directly into his.


@Corradh

Amaunet’s unabashed hunger emboldens him; it steals his heart and his appetites, a vivid reminder that as the youngest son of one of Solterra’s wealthiest families, he is not often privileged to such apparent wants. Everything is thinly veiled; disguised as something it is not; polite yet utterly ingenuine. Corradh thinks of his brothers; he thinks of Adonai and Pilate and how the dishonesty there is treacherous, and larger than life, prevalent and inescapable. Always, always the disdain disguised as brotherly love. 

Let us discover it together then. She has pressed against him and Corradh’s heart is in his throat. His entire body rages; he becomes a wildfire in his soul, and without, and where she presses a violent heat blossoms. She is hot like the desert is hot. She is nearly too beautiful to look at. There is no space between them and her voice—like a kiss—is swiftly replaced by her mouth against the nape of his neck.

That is where a jaguar bites to kill.

He read that, somewhere, once.

Their jaws are so powerful they crush through bone, and paralyse their prey.

He had never even seen a jaguar, though. But what Corradh has watched before are the storms that, sometimes, hit Solterra.

He has watched the way they come upon the desert like a blight; flood-waters and torrents, clouds so dark the day becomes night. Corradh, abruptly, feels as if he is beneath that same omnipotence now. His smile is roguish; he finds himself showing all his teeth, a gesture rare for the thirdborn son. And when you are bloated with power and fat with the taste of me, I will let you fall to your knees and pray. 

“I am already praying.” Corradh admits, and in the admittance his tail lashes at her flank. Her hunger opens something in him as cavernous as a bottomless pit; it echoes with her appetite, and each touch transforms him from noble, boy, fighter, prince to something wilder, more arcane, less articulate.

“What then, Amaunet, do we conquer first?” Corradh turns his too-green, too-feral eyes to her. “Should I unleash you upon the palace where my brothers live, like a hurricane? Into the citadel? The mountains? The vast, wide desert?” More quietly, in a voice edged with want, “Or do we run into the rising sun and find the power in ourselves?” 


@Amaunet || "Speech." || 

in the desert, i saw a creature, naked, bestial who squatted upon the ground, held his heart in his hands, and ate of it. I said, "is it good, friend?" "it is bitter, bitter," he answered; "but I like it, because it is bitter, and because it is my heart."

He reminds her of her trial, of the gypsy boy with teeth bright enough to be stars in his black mouth. There is that same look in his feral eyes, that same spoiled fatness that has the potential to turn to wine or to sludge. It's in the curl of his neck and in the poetry of his voice as he curls wildcat sleek beneath her wings (like a wolf beneath the holy, silvered moon).

Perhaps it is the curse of being male, to be full of stars in the place of teeth and to think that one must choose between things to conquer.

She does not smile against his skin as she drags her teeth along the fragile shell of his ear. “We do not have to choose.” No cursed thing is strong enough to carry the weight of her and so she corrects him with breath hot enough to be doused in flame. Amaunet pulls at his ear like the darkness pulls at the moon, soft enough that she might pull loose the light from the hard, dark ore.

“We can have it all, every inch, until there is nothing not gilded with the stain of us.” The promise of a young-god, a feral girl, a desert girl leafed in gore and gold, rings off her lips like the whisper of a sacrificial blade on skin. She wonders if he knows that she's marking him now, dragging touches and promises like daggers around his skin, each one deeper than the last.

And she will not stop until his soul and his dark, dark heart unfurls beneath her like a bruise.

Her wings settle at her sides, tracing their last lines across his flesh (for now). Space yawns between them like lions as she turns. Amaunet pauses, smiles over her shoulder in a look hot with molten gold, and she kicks out his forelegs. “Next time you should start on your knees.” Laughter blooms thick and fermented as wine on her tongue.

“Otherwise I will not grant your prayers.” She's still laughing when the crowd starts to fill up the gap-jawed space between them. And she does not stop until the desert stretches as long an low as a great sandwyrm beneath her.


@Corradh