There is no music but the drum-beat of her feet and the whisper-rustle of her wings and the sound of both their breathing: hers quick and slow by turns, matching her feet, and his own quiet and even and slow, the way a deep-forest fern might breath if given lungs instead of leaves.
They might not be in a palace in Denocte, build up by dreams and by war, but in a temple in the wilderness far from any city. Somewhere the sunlight could reach it and fill it with gold, somewhere only goat-paths go, somewhere with the forest thick and full and still growing up and up.
Somewhere offerings were made, and blessings given.
And then she slows and he leans forward, eyes intent, more watchful and wanting than any forest-beast who crept the undergrowth. But his smile is the smile of a man.
It curls wider when she speaks - his Florentine, whose voice was a golden bell never stilled. “Of course,” he says, low, and when he blinks his eyes closed they are there again, in bodies graceful and bare and just as fragile as these, with a glass-ballroom floor and mysteries in the shadows between the stars.
One world of many - and how many yet to come? He breathes out, out, through his teeth and in the heaviness of wine reminds himself that Novus is no more to them than any of those other worlds. Oh, he has been too long a man; he will forget soon how to be a god.
If he is not careful.
Dance with me again, she says, and her eyes fall upon his, capture his gaze in the amethyst of hers. “Of course,” he repeats, and crosses to her, patterned with shadows from the moonlight and lattice.
Close he comes to her, presses his hip alongside her own, buries his muzzle in the tangled spun gold of her mane. He closes his eyes when he feels the brush of her feathers against his silver-scarred side; he inhales the scent long-familiar of the flowers bound up in her mane, which grew no where else. “If I recall you made me cast off my shoes,” he says, and there is only enough of his voice to stir the hair around her ear. “But we have nothing to take off here.”
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