' Hardly has the universe stretched its wings to span '
They look at each others like wolves and lions (although he would like to say, like wolves and god). It's the way the night seem heaviest in that space between them that makes Veer almost regret that it's the stallion's throat that catches his eyes instead of his pale skin against all that black water. “When it suits us we are.” He says as he forces his eyes away from that pulse. Instead of blood they find moonlight and starlight and he wonders if the stallion would taste like silver-sugar or like ice.
“What good are gods,” Veer laughs again and there's a certain fervor to it that seems black, black and spoiled. “if we cannot take from them?” And as he dips his smile beneath the black water and drinks deeply of the soot and ink salted water his eyes seem to suggest, gods are made to drink.
And then it's not black water they stand in but an altar of blood and rot and ash.
Veer badly wants to close the small, fragile distance between them. He wants to lay his feathers across the stallion's spine like a funeral veil. It's only that wolf and silver gaze that stops him. That and the questions of prices and wealth. Suddenly they are speaking the same language-- gods and wealth, sins and souls.
“If there was a price to pay, would you pay it?” When he lifts his head from the water, when drops of black water fall from his lips like meteors and rot there is no flash of teeth to break up the black darkness between them. Only black and gold and mortal skin that's made to bleed.
Perhaps the stallion is no murder but he is, he is.
This time he lifts his wings up (he's done resisting) and they sing a promise, a bond. They sing like paper coins made out of flesh (stamped with points of bone). The sing like religion, like immortal blood turned to black-water.
This time he closes the distance between them and there's something hot on his lips that makes the water steam and dew on his cheekbones. One before he spoke of prices with a stag instead of a wolf. And oh! He thinks a wolf might know how to really live.
Because wolves and lions are predators and predators are gods.
Behind them Najjad, another god, lifts his wings and those feathers seem to sing too.
@Toulouse
