' Hardly has the universe stretched its wings to span '
It is not the artwork that has him lingering at the bottom of the mountains as the night just starts to paint the sky with line after line of blue until the sky looks as dark as ink (or as crusted blood). None of the paintings or the sculptures catch his gaze. Certainly none of the art sparks something in the hollow, needy pool of his soul.
Veer's soul wants things darker than art. It wants blood and violence, wealth and sin. It wants like a god's soul, it wants the universe.
So tonight when he walks through the gardens with Najjad his side it's not the art that makes them look away from the glow of the moon. Their eyes catch on the shadows at the base of each sculpture and on the darkness between the lights. It's the secrets that they want tonight, the secrets and the debased monsters that hide out of sight and pretend that it's art that brings them into a garden like a Eden.
Every garden needs a snake just as much as every garden needs a rose.
Najjad is the one that spots her first. The part of the gryphon that is more bird that lion always spots the brightest things first. She glitters like the scales of of a fish swimming too close to the whitewater of a dark stream. Look. Najjad says to Veer in that yawning space between them, look there.
Veer, when he turns to follow the arrow of his friends beak, sighs. She looks almost like art lingering between shadows in a pool of moonlight between the soft frame of vellum thin silk. And ah! This is the art that Veer can appreciate-- carnal with blood rushing in rivers beneath the canvas of it.
His steps when they carry him to her are slow and heavy. Each twig snaps under his hooves and he bids Najjad to ruffle his feathers loud enough to make the two of them the loudest song below the mountain. Tonight Veer is golden, bright and bold and he has no need for the silence that comes when he dips his body in ink and ash.
He joins her with a smile that shines like pearls in the dark and looks nothing like a lion's smile. At his side Najjad only lingers, now silent, beneath the shadows of Veer's massive wings. “Do you feel anything when you gaze at it?” He gestures to a sculpture of twisted, dark metal beside them. It looks a little like iron and silver as the moon sweeps out from a cloud to shine on it. At the base of the twisted metal small roses bloom, red as blood with thorns that look a little like teeth.
And in the silence he inhales the smell of her, flowers and violence and wealth.
@Euryale
