“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"
There is desolation in the desert, there upon the surface of it, for everyone to see. It hangs above the dune in a haze, a layer of shifting gold and silver at seems thick enough to choke on. The miles seems endless, and silent but for the roar of a sand-monster, and bloated with light. Today the desert is no different. Like always is as endless as its god and brutal as the beasts that bed down in the dune each night.
But there is another world below that desolation, below the sun-bloat and the thick haze. It's a howl in the wind that seems to come from the distant sea. There are hints of it in the dunes, where the wind blows ripples of sand instead of storms. It's that trail that Amaunet follows, spreading out below the shadow of her wings like a map only she can see. She's flown it so many times the wind seems to whisper her name between her feathers, like it's welcoming home a wayward child with blood on their lips instead of dirt.
When she loops lazy circles over the pathway a pack of jackals only lift their heads like rabbits spotting a hawk. For a moment she wonders what they would do if she swooped low as an eagle and bellowed at them like a lion. Would they run or would they mount a war?
Amaunet almost gives in to the wondering. Almost--
Ahead there is the glare of many spears lifted in a war-game, and the soft echo of a battle-cry. It all looks like art to her, the violence of the weapon and the poetry in the sinew of the forms holding death in their grasp. It all looks like home. Her own soft huff of violence echoes down to them, and in the pack she can see her mother lift her eyes up like a lion looking at its cub come to steal the pride (there is a little love in it, but mostly warning.).
The sand feels almost hot under her hooves when she lands in a flurry of feather and dirt. Like a wolf she shakes it off, tossing her feathers until all the dirt and grime of her travels is gone (until she shines like delicate lamb she might pretend to be). Her eyes blaze over the gathered Davke and her teeth flash as her whole body says, remember me, remember how I came to you once with blood on my lips and a body in my wake.. Even now she knows better than to show weakness here.
Amaunet spreads her wings, wide enough that the sun seems only a holy ring of light behind her, as the rest of the Davke settle back into the training. She does not join them, not yet. There is something else she's waiting for. It came as a whisper on the wind, and like any beast that can see the world below the desolation, she listened.
So she settles into waiting, never once shedding that halo of light around her form.
In the distance, somewhere over the blazing horizon, she hears a song of spearheads; they ring sharply in her ears while she stands, statuesque, at the crest of a dune. She listens and she cannot help but tip her nose to the sun and simply revel in it. This is the sound of her people beginning again, of the Davke crawling back up from the depths of whatever hell Solterrans thought they had been sent to and emerging stronger than ever. They are the undying, resilient and fierce and eternally wild.
Avdotya smiles and the dry cracks of her lips break anew. For a fleeting moment she knows bliss, it sends a chill down her spine and sparks a primitive desire to run - just run.
So she does.
She lurches from the dune and tears down its slope with reckless abandon, leaving a squall of dust in her wake as her stride eats up the ground with liquid ease. The sensation of sweat cooling her hide against a rolling wind is better than anything she has experienced in a long time - it is rejuvenating and she becomes lost in the feeling. For a moment, the Khan merely is. She is alive, she knows no sense of loss or betrayal, all she knows is the sand beneath her hooves and the hot sun upon her back.
But she has plans, the viper does, and she will soon shed that coat of simplicity for the skin of the serpent all of Novus knows she is. There are dark desires enshrouding her splintered heart and she knows now is the time to act on them, for Solterra has grown quiet. The court knows normalcy once more, it knows routine and worry-free days with Orestes, the bright and shiny ruler at the helm.
The time draws nearer to set the kindling, but for that Avdotya seeks a set of hands to lay down such things... and how perfect a time for her eyes to catch those of a girl set aglow by burning sunlight, wings outstretched and demanding of attention. Avdotya descends the last dune that lay in her path to the Davke, sliding easily with the ebb and flow of sand as it collapses beneath her weight. She does not pause to greet them all, but instead glides over to where the winged girl watches. ”I see purpose in those eyes.” She notes casually, slowly winding around the mare to find her place alongside her.
Amaunet could watch the Khan slide across the dunes like water for days and never tire of the sight. It's always been flight for her, instead of sand, that made her hooves feel cased in molten gold and the spirit of the mortal coil. But looking at Avdotya, with her halo of golden sand as alive as a tide and her skin salted with the sweat of freedom, she can admit that there is a certain romantic beauty to it.
Not that she has any love for beauty, it's nothing more than another tool by which to bring knaves to their knees (like altar boys before the holiness of her).
Her smile to the Khan is as wicked as the glare of the spears catching the sunlight below them. There are a hundred silent things in her look, a hundred hidden snares waiting for a rabbit's neck. Her snare gaze follows Avdotya as she circles her until their looking at the same sea of desert monsters. She knows she should dip her head respectfully to the Khan, but she doesn't have it in her to be a tame thing and so she only lifts her head.
Amaunet stays wild.
“Among other things.” A laugh lives in the echo of her voice and the shine in her eye turns wild as white-water, as stardust, as chaos. She shutters her eyes as the word dissolves back into the song of spears and violence. The other things are still her own, too newborn to share and half-formed. But oh, oh, oh, there is a soft glow that starts to ebb from her like a heartbeat. It's desert gold, feeding off the drills below her and all the purposes between spearhead and flesh. Perhaps it's the glow that will give away all her secrets and leave behind a memory of how brightly she shone the day of her trial.
Perhaps.
Amaunet turns away from the drills and the desert sun stinging at her eyes when she opens them. The snare smile still has not faded, nor have her wings (a subconscious statement of her form). At her neck the feather with a single stain of blood-red, swings with the sudden movement. Below them the dune roils like a storm. “And what is it that lives in your eyes, Avdotya?” The sand sounds like rain as it rolls downward. She steps closer to offer her nose, a greeting between almost equals in a way that has nothing to with experience.
It has everything to do with violence and all the things that live in gazes accustomed to looking at the sun and demanding more.
She notes the way Amaunet lifts her head, how she so seamlessly foregoes the commands of tradition for that of her own will and desire. Avdotya does not balk at her boldness, she tastes no bitterness upon her tongue; how hypocritical would she be, she thought, if she were to scorn a girl for her denial of age-old customs when she herself has been guilty of the same. No, the viper is not so insecure in her authority that she feels the need to enforce her place as khan. Instead she simply pivots an ear towards her, a quiet acknowledgment while her firelit eyes study the ongoing activities below.
Her mind, however, wanders elsewhere. And what is it that lives in your eyes, Avdotya? The question lingers there, it whirls through her thoughts and stirs what has laid dormant for many a moon now. She feels chaotic, yearns for disruption and the way her gaze subtly turns to Amaunet suggests just that. There is a hunger brewing in the pit of her chest that seeks to be sated and in this woman Avdotya sees opportunity. She watches it flourish before her in the form of a savage, sultry girl capable of bringing the world to its knees if she so pleased.
And so she reaches out just slightly, enough to meet Amaunet’s nose as she offers it to her in an exchange much more significant than it appears. Yet she does not answer her question, for there is no need; the world already knows what lives in the eyes of a snake.
”Tell me... do you thirst for kingsblood?” Avdotya’s gaze drifts, but still she somehow maintains a strangely soft expression. She is (oddly) the picture of casual with her spear, loosed from its sheath, twirling nonchalantly under the careful hand of her will. She imagines Orestes perched atop his golden throne in the capitol, preaching freedom to the walls of an empty and opulent room. He was so terribly confident, the khan recalls, so sure of himself in their exchange beneath the winter pines of that peculiar island - she didn’t like that. Of course, there may have been a bias. Avdotya has never been partial to those who bear the crown, but she truly lacks the compassion to care for the well-being of so-called royalty.
”It really is divine.” If Amaunet looks closely enough, she just might be able to catch the twinge madness in her smile.
Beneath the melody of spear against spear and form against form, her thoughts seem almost delicate. There is a subtly to her own viciousness that's a small echo of the Khan's. A cocked hoof, lazy weapon, and the lion like looseness to her muscles. The violence is an easy thing to see, it's tangled with the wildness in the flare of her wings and the glow of her skin. But the viciousness is deeper than that, almost nothing more than a quiver of her skin that might be nothing more than a chill in a wind as it sweeps through.
Or maybe the Khan can see it anyway, no matter how subtle.
When she laughs it's another wind rolling through the desert, a golden hue of dawn over a corpse, a whisper of blood drawn by a blade. Amaunet smiles with teeth as she turns to focus solely on Avdotya. Her wings settle back to her sides, her body going from sleepy lion to reckless youth in no more than a thrum of her heat. “If I have any interest in kingsblood it is not for the divinity of it.” And it's a glimmer in her look, a blasé glare, that promises Amaunet has very little in her yearns for something that is holy.
She leans closer to the Khan and her spinning spear. The power of her own wills taps against the edge of it, angles it out toward the city on the other side of the desert. Each of her teeth shine bone-bright where the sun catches on them. It's a feral look, a violent look, a look not yet falling into madness, blood-lust or viciousness.
There is intelligence there, a wicked sort of cleverness. Both are in her movements as she presses her lips towards the Kahn's ear. It's a gesture that could be a kiss, a hint of something profane, a promise of that same more, more, more the Davke are always yearning for. But when she whispers, “If you're thirsty Kahn we'll have to find you some water.” Each feather on each of her wings rustles like she's already flying towards the oasis.
Water is never a hard thing to find for those who know the direction in which it flows.
