“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
Her eyes watch him as a doe watches a wolf, deep and hooded with lashes quivering beneath the weight of dusty snow. Even then, when every inch of her is poised in the snow-light, there is still that promise of dance and that plea to come closer, come closer. Almost, almost do her lungs heave with a heady sigh when he moves out of the darkness, through that cleave of gray and snow dust, into the firelight with her. And when he shakes his alters, her neck quivers underneath her tangled mane with the urge to dance to the sound of his adornments hitting bones.
She wonders if in the spring his antler will grow bloody, and if he carves his mark into great oak trees before they shed from his head like broken, wounded crowns. Part of her thinks she would follow that trail through the woods. She would along dance along his map of blood and injured trees like a god dodging mortality even as they love it.
The urge to move when he brushes against her golden chain itches at every joint in her body. But she tells herself she is stone, and rock, and earth. She tells herself to wait, just a little longer, wait until the snow starts to fall like a heavy secret. And it does, it falls a little thicker on their backs and their hair looks dusted with diamonds when she lets the silence drag out just a little too long.
Each movement of her hooves feels heavy to her, like she's stepping into another skin when she turns to face him. Amusement, and a little bit of something terrible and golden, flashes in sparks of reflected firelight in her eyes. Her smile brightens to a suggestion that if she had wold teeth too she would wield them well. She lets her neck curl and her anklets chatter softly, like songbirds in a dark twilight forest.
Al' Zahra steps back, back towards the crowds ebbing and flowing like a tide around them. In the distance another song starts, the pitch of it soft but the faint words she can barely hear rise up something wild in her heart. She smiles for the ache of it, for all the blood rushing through her veins like lightning. Could he hear it, the way she's as loud as a rushing river beneath the secret, muted snow?
“Oh,” She pauses, inhales and steps back just a little more. “I could never tell you.” Each word rings below that distant, muted song, like a tolling bell instead of a praying one. Her tail flicks at her side and snow starts to move out of pattern around her, as if she knows the very rhythm of the world and has decided like a storm-cloud that it no longer suits her. “But I could show you.” The crowds starts to lap at the edges of her shadows. She smiles once more, like a doe learning how to be a wolf.
And then--
She lets the crowd sweep her away like a feather on the wind, or like a bit of sea-foam on the edge of the shore. But she lets her gold sing louder than the song, than the hundred hoof-steps around her. She is louder than the fire cracking and sparking in the middle of it all like a pyre of dangerous, hunger light. When she laughs it's crystal clear and louder than it all.
It begs him to follow.
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