"It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be."
He is still a solitary thing in the sky for none of the others are brave enough to cast their shadows away from the sun-god and their status at his side. Veer alone cuts through icy sky and his lazy circles get both larger and higher as he follows along with the herd of soon-to-be hunters.
He is soon-to-be nothing.
He is. He is.
The faint echoes of words drift up to him. Sometimes he catches the glint of sunlight off a hurl-bat and other strange, brighter than skin spots on horses' faces. Most of him is glad he's high enough to be free of whatever strange, heading to battle, rituals the god or the queen might have. The other part of him, that deep part that is still a boy who was hated by his father, wonders what he might be missing out of him. But that is tiny, almost smaller than dust, and so he starts his own ritual.
Veer stretches his wings and hums with the sound the wind makes as it cuts like a blade between his feathers. He grinds his teeth together and licks the frost and dryness from his lips. Beneath his skin his spine coils like a wildcat and all his muscles almost purr for the stretch. Najjad is rubbing off on him, everyday he is more lion and more eagle than horse.
He feels like a coiled cobra—waiting, waiting, waiting.
A creature appears on a snow-covered dune just as the sky around him thickens with snow and each of his breaths rises up from him like smoke. Veer uncoils as quickly as a cobra then, and he folds his wings tight to his body so that he might become both an arrow and a sword. In the morning light he shines like polished obsidian.
Down, down, down.
He dives and wonders just how much strength he might need to snap those icy looking horns from the beast's head like petals from a rose. Veer is eager to find out for here, with violence singing in his blood and frost chilling the fire of his need, he is home.
