“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
She is fire enough to know the way a shadow moves like a snake. Her dreams of full of shadows, of ageless memories of how to make a shadow shed its darkness like skin. Something in her gaze promises the knowledge when she looks at his eyes. It's there in the glimmer of gold, flaked like rust, that she would be happy to help him shed all his gold and his sand so that he might really learn what's underneath it all.
And then she would tell him what's under the world and what's under all that blackness in the night sky.
All the silk below her feels like a sea when the curl of his neck starts to remind her of a cobra made of shadows. It ripples in waves with each song her body sings when she settles back into it. The smell of him is still a flavor on her lips when she smiles and curls her nose downward like a wilting flower. It is as much a lie as the sweet civility in way they are both reclined on pillows like house cats instead of lions.
Al'Zahra's laughter rings like a pearl hung between a glass bell-curve. It's tainted with a little of the fire that still echoes and haunts her each time she closes her eyes and turns the world black. “So many options.” When she cants her body to the side her gold makes a hollow sound. Below that her pulse is a bass drum beating, beating, beating with a song only the center of the world knows how to sing.
She does not pause to wonder if he can hear it.
“If I said that I wanted each and every one of them, what would you ask of me in return?” Her smile in that wilted curl of her neck lifts and her teeth look like moons over a field of blood-red silk and dark, hot skin. She unfurls her neck and her gold blooms with it. A breath catches in her lungs. That smile pauses and trembles, but never waives.
And beneath all that her blood is still thrumming and her eyes are still promising to fold him back like dead snake-skin.
@Anatoly
