' Hardly has the universe stretched its wings to span '
For a moment his belly hums with laughter and his ribs vibrate like the tip of a cobra's tail. She is a bold slip of youth, he thinks (his Elif, his secret, his). Perhaps she's too bold, but then boldness and beauty and gold are the only things Veer finds any value in. So he swallows his laughter. And if he feels any guilt, to look at the curl of her throat and think of blood, he swallows that up too like the a great god might swallow up an entire ocean. It all goes down in one gulp-- one sweet, sweet swallow.
Najjad flies around them in patterns that look a little like a coils of snake. Veer doesn't bother watching his friend. Part of him isn't sure that he wants to look at anything but bold, delicate Elif and the way she welcomes battle like a hawk might welcome a mongoose. And it's not until she rises in a rear that Veer finally relents, and breaks the silence even as he moves closer and closer, under the cover of her bravery, to that tiny tunnel behind them.
“Ah,” There are theatrics in his voice and maybe a little bit of sadness. His eyes blaze against the backs of her feathers and he wonders if she can feel the burn and sting of all his secrets. “I've seen your sort of boldness before.” If she turns to look she'll see his smile taunting as hotly as the blade of a knife might tease that lovely red fabric around her neck.
Veer lifts his wings wider and wider and wider until he eclipses the only exit she knows. There is nothing for you here, not now. His feathers sing as he begins to seem so very large inside the belly of the earth. I did not lie.
The gryphon flies a little lower and the air seems thick with the strange feline-eagle musk of his mighty, golden wings. His beak curls like an almost smile and his eyes pulse on the horses below as if he only wants, wants, wants. Still Veer ignores him as if his life is so precious a thing that no beast would ever dare to take it.
Maybe she can see the secret in that too?
“Don't let it kill you.” His smile dissolves into dark violence and gold when his chains jingle almost merrily as he turns and vanishes into the darkness of the tunnel at his back. One he's nothing more than another shadow in the darkness he lets his hooves and his wings carry him away as swiftly as a sand-storm.
Delay her. He says down that channel of violence between him and Najjad.
And so the gryphon dives, landing before the only way out that she might know about. There are more, of course, hidden in a hundred different shadows here. Najjad, like the stallion before him, spreads out his wings. They say, like before, that there is nothing here for her.
Out in the desert and the sunlight Veer lets himself disappear like a single grain of sand in Solterra. Today most of his secrets will still belong to him and him alone
But only today.
