“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
When the first snowflake falls her hooves are falling softer than that on stone. The fire is a veil around her shadow, cutting through it, stretching it, building around it a halo. Each reflected bit of firelight finds another flake of snow, soft as a raindrop, falling and pooling in the hollow channel of her back. She dances harder for the snow, loving the way nature feels like ice splintering her skin, even as the fires singe her nose when she strays too close the red.
The snow and the fire make her feel like a wild-thing made holy by a halo of orange-light. She feels a little like a jinn untamed, an ifrit made of ash and smoke. It feels like her skin is not a cage, but light rippling over soft, golden bones.
Snowflakes watch her move and cling to the song she's singing. They remember, the sky remembers, the earth at her shadow remembers. They all remember what it was like to be endless and open, with no buildings cutting through them like wounds.
Al'Zahra dances for the earth. Her legs are the bones of it rising through the dirt and stone.
She twines from fire to fire and the silk shrouds of bodies ripple across her like water when she strays too close to the merchants. The way her eyes shine when she looks at them says an apology her lungs have no extra air to say. They all smile at her. It's not the first time she's danced to close to them, or knocked their tables into a song of chiming glass and moaning wood.
On and on she moves through the markets like a river, and a snowflake, and a bit of molten gold carved from the dirt. She dances until the firelight changes to darkness that seems to catch each flake of snow and make it pause before falling. The snowflakes look like fireflies here, white and bright against all that blackness (and the last bit of firelight clinging violent to her).
She misses her wild halo the moments she turns to the stallion hanging between the darkness and the lamp-light. He looks handsome and ominous all at once. A smile curls her lips and her teeth look like a slash of moonlight against her black muzzle. “Hello.” Her voice rings softly just like the gold metal tapping against her shoulders begging her to move, to dance, to do anything but stand still.
But her eyes, they don't say hello. They shine like small fires, or maybe halos, and they say come into the light, the darkness is no place to be.
