veer
It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be.
But you understand, don’t you?
But you understand, don’t you?
T
he night is almost dark and moonlit when he takes to the streets. Tonight he is as dark as the space between the stars. Each of his feathers is heavy with ink and silent with the weight of all his secrets. His heart is the only part of him that feels like air. It beats in his chest like a war-drum in a thunderstorm. The world around him moves so slowly compared to that wild bass echoing in a hall of rib bones. Veer almost cannot bear the slowness of the world.
When he walks through the streets each soldier watches him pass. They smile and nudge their shoulders together, whispering of fights and fortunes. Each of them wonders who he will kill tonight; who will find death as the end of his hooves. Perhaps they are wondering if it's fire in his golden eyes tonight or if it's apathy. He smiles at some of them and his teeth are small white stars in the endless blackness of him.
Tonight the Black Falcon has returned to the streets and there is a war-drum beating in his heart.
And so when a solider turns towards towards a boy, as the sun sinks past the dunes and the curfew lowers upon the city like a gavel, the Falcon follows. He dissolves into the weighted darkness and it welcomes him like a old friend. In the alley shadows he stalks the lamb of a enforcer (he would know of course, he knows them and lies when he calls them friends).
The pressure of his wings at his sides is a comfort for each whispers against his ribs like knives against an altar. They crave violence as much as he. When he cuts in front of the lamb they rise at his side like sickles that once, in a legend, cleaved the moon from the sky. He smiles and his teeth are less like stars now and more like hungry stones. “You will turn away.” The Falcon does not ask, and something in his war-drum heart begs the lamb to think of becoming a lion. A sickle wing presses against the boy's side telling him to run far, run fast.
The soldier pauses, lifting his rusted blade slowly as if the blade wants to fight more than the stallion wielding it. The black Pegasus winks as he drags a black coated hoof across the dusted stone beneath them. Something in him laments when the soldier lowers his weapon and turns away, looking perhaps for citizens in a place far from the supposed fighting pits.
This area of the capital belongs to him and that beating thunderstorm in his belly.
The Black Falcon turns back towards the alley maze and walks on boldly through the almost moonless night. He walks without fear. His only companion is that ache in his chest that tells him that he want's something and the blood-lust running feral through him.
And this is how the hunters become the hunted.
open | "speaks" | notes: <3
