“”
Beneath the midday sunshine's glow,
The splashing of footsteps through water stirred in the lilac lady a catlike alertness. Anticipation knotted her muscles as tight as bowstrings, and even though she wasn't hungry she could not help the brief anticipatory rush that precedes the kill. Instinct begged her silence and she obeyed, a faintly glistening statue in the willow's dappled shadow as the careless shunk shunk shunk drew nearer.
He rounded the tree trunk. For a moment she simply lay there and stared, a deer caught in the headlights of indecision as a part of her argued the virtues of gluttony against the other's surprise at being caught out in the creek of all places, where for months she had passed unseen and unremarked by lovers and passersby alike. A third part - the part that may once have been prey - wondered impotently if he would think his eyes misled him if she simply kept very, very still.
He was the rich brown of good earth, and where sunlight succeeded in filtering through the willow's brushy crown stars twinkled in stripes of deep violet. But the biggest and brightest star lay right between a pair of deep russet eyes laden with the shadows of a hundred unspoken preoccupations. Myfanwy shimmered, but in the right light she was sure that this boy would shine - and like the starlight embedded in his skin, something about his eye seemed distant and sad.
Oh, the stranger said.
A beat. The spark of their eye contact jolted her back to reality, and squeaking a startled "oh goodness!" she leapt to her feet with all the unearthly grace of a duck on dry land. "Is this your place?" she blurted stupidly, despite the fact that in seasons of basking she had never seen him there before.
“”
Dance for a hundred years or so.
@Asterion
