There is a hum in the fresh-dead daylight, an echo of energy as the warmth leeches it self from the stones like blood. Amaunet can feel it in the bruised twilight at the edge of the city; she can taste it in the places where the fires at the gates bleed into the violet, violent desert. It tastes electric on her tongue and each breath makes her lungs quiver as if she's just swallowed a storm.
Over and over again Amaunet inhales, holding in the storm, begging it to explode inside this fragile from. She wonders what she will become-- more storm than girl, or only bones and gore scattered on the streets to fester until the rains.
She's still wondering, and twilight-dreaming, when she reaches the bone and red-stone gates. She's still twilight-dreaming when the guards nod her through. Later they know she'll have a story for them, blood in the corner of her lips, and a kiss on the cheek for each of them for their silence. Later they will night-dream of her-- how being devoured by the feral, noble bastard girl might be worth all the blood, and burning.
And later, after the first later, and beyond the second later, she'll visit them in their sleep to lay a bone coin on their windowsills. A warning and a gift. It's always the same. The group them them have not reached the end of their game-- not yet, not yet.
Tonight her wings itch to fly, to fill their crevices with stardust and sand, to scream though the wind like an eagle as the night devours both the girl and her storm-lungs. But from above the snake gates are nothing more than another dune, another shadow in the blackness that's hardly darker than the sand sea. So she starts to walk, then gallop,with her wings flared wide, and war-paint glimmering in the corners of her gaze. She welcomes the burn in her lungs, a fire beneath a storm, and the salt sting of sweat frothing on her chest.
She even welcomes the sting of sand in her eyes and the way it brings almost-tears with it. There is no part of the desert, of the bruised twilight, of the almost-flying though the dunes hiding away the sand-monsters., that she does not love. She runs until the snake gates rise up before her, their eyes rubies the size of her head that glimmer with all the violence echoing in her lungs.
Only then does she stop, and upon hearing the same steps behind her that followed her through the desert, Amaunet only smiles and steps between the guardian cobras made of stone.
That alone is enough to tell August that she is somebody, even if it weren’t given away by how the others watched her as though they were gazelles and she a lioness among them. There was fear in some of their eyes, and awe, and jealousy and want and distaste - all the expressions he knew to follow power.
And he followed too, with nothing asking for his time and only an itch beneath his skin, a hollowness in his mind, an ache under his jaw. August feels the hum as the dark and the cold settle like a sigh around the city; he feels like the sky before a storm, taut almost to trembling, still but building and waiting for the first hailstone, the first meeting of lightning and sand.
Whatever this stranger has, whatever she is with paint like a snake’s warnings over her eyes and the vivid white striping her, he wants it, or to be near to it, or to watch it for just a little longer. To take some of it for himself and remember what it is like, to smile down at the world and need nothing it offers.
There is almost trouble at the gate. The guards are still distracted after her passing, but he still must use the emissary’s name, which gives him a sear of shame. But then he is out in the wide desert, painted in deep, rich tones like dyed silk. It is a holy kind of place - he can admit that even as he knows a viper might lurk underfoot anywhere. It does not feel safe in the way Denocte always has to him, and it is not just the memory of all the blood the sand has drunk.
But there is not time for contemplation now, and he is grateful for it. She is running, a swift dark wind sweeping down over the dunes, and without giving himself time to reconsider August follows.
It has been a long time since he has run like this, with his legs extending fully and the sharp cold air burning in his lungs, and it feels like glory. It doesn’t matter that he’ll pay for it in aching muscles later. It only matters that he keeps her ahead of him, the white slashes on her wings guiding him like a beacon, a little cloud of sand billowing behind her like a veil. August wonders where she’s going, but doesn’t even truly care; it is enough to run, to see her running. To be out from the city and its people and have only the eyes of the stars watching him, cold and distant though they are.
At the sight of the gates he stops. He’s breathing heavily, too distant for her to hear him, and his breath steams up in little clouds, the wind freezing the sweat on his sides. His heart is still knocking at his ribs like a card in spokes but it is not just from running, not when his silver eyes pick out the carved shapes of twin snakes with their eyes red and small as old embers.
She still does not look back. And as soon as he’s caught his breath, August follows her through the gates.
@Amaunet
August - -
there's a lover in the story but the story's still the same
First there is only silence beyond the crest of the twin snakes. There is still that weight in the air, that electric hum expanding beyond her form. Even her hooves are near-silent on the sand. Only her feathers make any real sound at all, a soft sigh like whisper, a promise and a beckoning. Perhaps it's the only siren call the ruin knows how to sing-- a melody of sand and flight-dreams, a whisper of what might have been back in the time of gods. And when she drags her nose against the cool stone and inhales there is only the smell of ruin hanging to the dust, ruin and long faded blood-stains.
When the sound starts to trickle back in it's suddenly. It starts with a bellow of rage. There is the sound of hoof, tooth, and claw, that starts to drum beneath the dying silence, feeding the rage. Each sound only encourages the other to grow louder, to be bolder, to comes as frequent as falling stars on a shed-star night of ritual. Here, in the belly of the desert (or is it the belly of the twin snakes?), the world is alive with everything feral, everything reckless, everything hungry, everything born with sand in the blood and a center-of-the-sun where a heart should be. The crowd almost swallows her whole as she wades into it like its queen.
Amaunet exhales the smell of ruin an inhales deeply of the smell of life. She drowns in it.
Her skin is only just starting to glow, a soft almost-in-the-dawn sort of golden, when she circles back to the stallion who followed her. This close she can see the moon-kiss in in his eyes, the silver ring on his nose begging to be tugged. Beneath her skin the magic hums, her hunger hums, the bellowing rage and the sound of hoof-tooth-claw hums. When she emerges from the hot press of the crowd it's directly beside him.
She can almost taste the sweat and sand on his skin when she presses her nose near his. And she can almost hear the echo of not-desert in his lungs and not-desert in the thrumming of his heartbeat. “Hello fool.” There are hardly any teeth in her sun-kissed smile and hardly any venom in the purring rasp of her voice. She's all lion, all Davke, all girl of sand, sun and gold. And here, in the crowd of the pits with her warpaint and her humming hunger for violence, Amaunet doesn't bother to hide the dangerous glimmer in her gaze. Nor does she do anything about the way her wings unfurl themselves over their backs like carrion clouds circling a half-dead fawn.
“Why were you following me?” The question is calm, too calm for the warning flashing in her golden glow. There's a killing in the calm of her, a whisper of something more than that siren song of the almost silent hall to his chaos. There is a promise in the way she drags her teeth against neck and snaps her wings as if the crowd is nothing more than a ring circling, circling, circling around the gravity of her.
And maybe it's more than a promise when almost as one the crowd starts to turn their eyes to wonder at the snapping of her wings (loud even in this den of rage).
It is a good hiding place. The canyons walls had done a good job of disguising the sound; it isn’t until he steps between those twin serpents (their eyes on him, unseeing, remind him of the eyes of sand of the not-snake on the island) that it all washes in and August, taken aback, only stands for a moment to get his bearings.
There is a festival air to the crowd, a kind of nervous frenzy that ripples through them. It feels the way it always did before a big tournament at the Scarab, when the liquor had been flowing for hours and the pot grew and grew until everyone could see their fortune in the next flip of cards. The problem always came later, when all fortunes but one turned to anger and despair. Even so it isn’t until he hears a sharp squeal, then the unmistakable sound of flesh meeting flesh, that he realizes where he must be. And that’s almost enough to drive the winged mare from his mind.
August steps further into the crowd, before his obvious newness draws too much scrutiny - but he doesn’t make it far before the people part and she emerges, glowing faintly, his Virgil who brought him to this questionable wonderland. Up close she is no less savage and magnificent; at her greeting he only grins and ducks his head in a mock bow, and August is a fool, because he isn’t at all concerned that she’d recognized him and come to find him.
Not even at the simmer in her lion-gold eyes, with red painted like a dead world’s sunset beneath them; not even at the way her wings lift to close them off from the world.
“To see where you led me,” he answers, as calmly, even as his heartbeat picks up at the waking want of the crowd and the way she towers over him. His blood feels like it’s humming, now, and every cell aware, like the run through the desert was just a warm-up. Like there’s something more, something better. And even when she reaches for him, he only flattens his ears at the pull of her teeth down the skin of his neck, and snaps his tail the way she snaps her wings, and bares his own teeth but does not touch.
August should know better. How many fools has he seen at the Scarab, stripped of their money and dignity, insisting to play before they knew the rules? But surely there are no rules here, or none but one - the oldest one, the law of blood.
“Is this it?” he asks, and the silver of her eyes meets the gold of hers, a wealth of need. Her skin is hot from the run through the desert, hot from the pressing crowd, and he wants that blood that runs just underneath, so near the surface, just like his own. “Or do you have more to show me?”
He is ready to gamble it all.
@Amaunet
August - -
there's a lover in the story but the story's still the same
Tonight there is madness hanging in the air like a fever. She can feel it, a brush a warmth against a feather where there had only been darkness pooling. It runs through her blood in humming notes, each rising to a roar that sounds like fire in a dead wood. The crowd will do more than ponder violence and sip at their liquor tonight.
Amaunet hums at the waiting madness and she lets her lips sing the song to him when she buries them with a laugh into his mane (inspired, of course, by the way he bared his teeth back at her). Her magic begs his wrath, his fury, each of his emotions hanging over a cliff on a threadbare rope, to rise.
She wonders what the insides of him look like, how his violence might start with a snarl and descend with a roar. She wonders how quickly he might bleed. “There is always more.” All the wondering lives in her voice, twisted together with sand and the low lion purr of the crowd pressing in around them.
But not a single on of them dares to bump into her, each keeping half an eye on her like a fish might an alligator.
The room shifts around her even as the fever starts to take it. The fight in the ring is slowly descending into blood-lust instead of sport. Out of the corner of her eye Amaunet watches each of the stallions struggle to survive by the will of their hooves and teeth alone. Her magic races out from her feeding, like the gluttonous thing it is, on their desperation.
Blood flies. Voices quicken into chaos. The crowd presses forward now that the metallic tang of blood is in the air (stronger tonight than the liquor she steals from a passing boy).
She offers the liquor to the golden stallion, turning her teeth from his skin and tucking her wings back into her sides. Later she'll learn to like him better on his knees with blood tangled in his hair like gemstones. Later she'll leave a warning by his windowsill.
Later his name will not matter.
One stallion in the ring dominates the other. She had seen it coming of course (she has never bet on a loser). And there is a lull in the fever madness as the crowd turns back to liquor, and gluttony, and lust. It seems heavier, almost, than the fury weight that had hung to the sounds of violence. In it she turns back to him, her magic still calling to his like a wolf to the moon, and says, “How deep into the belly of the beast would you like to go?”
The shine in her golden eyes already whispers that she's waiting at the bottom of it already. He just has to catch up.
The vibration from the laugh she presses to the golden arch of his neck seems to travel like an earthquake’s aftershock, reverberating through him until it hums in his shoulders, down along his spine, and most of all his skull. This is how easy it is for her to evoke the feelings she sought; he should be ashamed of how swiftly he is goaded. Then again, maybe everything in Solterra had been leading him here anyway (a hunt for a tiger-eyed stallion with a girl who came from the stars; a meeting with a lion and a king in a secret garden) and all he’d needed was to be shown the way.
(He has no idea that his guide is no simple shepherd, that the magic in her blood is calling to his own hungry heart, unspooling him little by little. August lives up so well to the name she has given him.)
Her breath is hot against his skin; he twists away when she speaks, teeth bared in a feral cousin to a grin, and his moon-silver eyes catch the gold of hers. Boldly he reaches forward and traces his muzzle to the white line painted along her fine-boned face, down to her lips. He finds that he wants to take one of the beads that dangle below her cheek and pull; he wants to pluck one of those white feathers for himself.
It’s the sounds from the ring that distract him. August turns his head from her at the shuddering thud of flesh on flesh; there is something glazed about his expression already and a sheen of sweat from his run across the sand as though he is already drunk, already spent. The black stallion seizes the nape of his competitor’s neck; August licks his lips as they rise together, hooves scraping for purchase. They part with a squeal only to come together again, an awful clash; even from here he can smell the blood, see it flecked in the foam clinging to their mouths and chests. He can’t tell which is winning.
For a moment he’s forgotten his companion and the way the others part around her, wiser than him. It’s not until she offers the cup that he turns back, though the chaos in the ring still calls to him. August looks at the cup, then to her. The liquor burns all the way down to his belly; he shows his teeth in half-grimace, half pleasure. August has no idea what he drank - it tasted like nothing so much as fire - but it settles like a Molotov. He already feels beyond words.
There is a ragged cheer and his attention returns to the ring, where one stallion is struggling to rise from the dust and the black is screaming his satisfaction, blood streaming from a cut along the meat of his shoulder. He watches both limp away to be swallowed by the crowd. Empty, the ring looks almost profane, a waiting altar.
Her voice startles him back into the moment; he turns to her, too raw and buzzed to be unnerved by the way her eyes settle on him as though he’s a hare. August doesn’t feel like prey; he feels like a conquistador. He feels like he could be a god.
But her words stir a warning in him. All his mind pictures when she says the belly of the beast is a snake of sand that swallowed them all up; a cavern where blood ran down the walls, a bear with half its face a skeleton covered in thin ribbons of skin and saliva. When his body shudders it is half foreboding and half desperate want. Maybe if he gives himself to that altar, maybe if he bests their blood-ritual, he forget how he felt when he came to on the beach of Denocte with the island a mocking suggestion on the horizon.
“All the way through,” he says, and his voice is low smoke from the liquor and madness. Already he wants to reach for her throat, or anyone’s. He’ll flay the beast from the inside out and leave it bleeding.
August takes a step toward the ring.
@Amaunet
August - -
there's a lover in the story but the story's still the same
It takes no more than a glance to still the keeper of the ring as he goes to call the next fight. This is the language they have always known-- a look between their white-rimmed and wild eyes. He is perhaps one of the few that knows how to read the hunger rippling in the edges of her shadow like a nest of young snakes. He knows what it means when she beds her teeth down in a tangle of mane and skin.
He knows.
But perhaps this fool (her fool) does not know what it means when she trembles and stills beneath the liquor stained fire of his touch down the hollows of her face.
A bit of light scrubs her face as she echoes his step towards the ring. She wonders what magic is calling to him, what blood lust; what song of violence might be echoing in his ears where the sound of his own heart should be. She wonders if it's a dull mimicry of the cacophony of her own wrath and rage singing around the marrow of her bones like a siren song. Would he be so bold without the lingering insidious kisses of her magic against his need?
Amaunet uses the crowd to push his steps closer and closer to the keeper of the ring. She follows him as if he is the lion now and she the lamb bedding down from the storm. Light dances like starlight and moon-fire in her gaze as they cross the ring of lights hanging between the crowd and the ring. She does not pause as she crosses the line of them. It is like coming home.
Her hunger is scalding now, as she turns to pluck a feather from her wings. It crawls like fire down her insides as she braids her feather into his mane. Another stallion approaches the other side of the ring. This is the type of hunger that takes men to their knees and fills their lungs with blood instead of air. She drags her teeth down his hip and nips at the soft flesh between bone and tail.
“Survive,” She says in teeth, and voice, and kiss. The keeper looks at them as her voice rises above the dull roar of the crowd as they turn as one to the boy with the silver eyes and the golden skin. “and I'll meet you at the bottom of it.”
And when she pulls away her laughter echoes like a gong that goes on, and on, and on.
He thinks it’s the drink that’s doing this to him, whatever was in it; cactus-nectar and sage-smoke on the heels of his run across the desert. What else could send him trembling over the edge of madness so readily, without even a glance back? Oh, she plays a part in it, the cords of hair and arcane paint, the molten gold of her eyes and the whisper of her lips and teeth over his skin, but August has no idea how much.
A fool, but a happy one. Or if not happy, at least not empty. At least alive.
The final test is to stay that way.
There is a firelight-glow out the corner of his eye but he never turns to see that it is her; there are plenty of other fires that send light bouncing and scattering and throwing up big shadows in the hot desert night. He is a feral thing there at the corner of the ring with her body crowded behind him; he trembles as she ties one of her feathers into his pale mane, his nostrils flared, eyes wide and wild. It is difficult to keep still, difficult to focus on anything but the noise of the crowd and the turbulent ground in the middle of the ring.
And then he lifts his gaze across it, and locks eyes with a stallion at the other side. August bares his teeth in matching greeting; the stranger’s ears twist back and his neck arches. In his expression August sees all the old enemies that live in his heart, and in the baring of his throat he sees the chance for blood.
The scrape of her teeth has him curving around; when she nips him he tosses his head to keep from lashing out, and the feather spins against his skin. ”Survive,” he hears, and there is god-light in her eyes, there is a thundering noise from the crowd, there is the sound of her laughter above it, echoing through him, sinking like teeth into his heart. There is only one way he knows of how to loosen its grip again -
he throws himself into the ring and it feels like letting go.
@Amaunet
August - -
there's a lover in the story but the story's still the same
