“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
For a moment--
Because there is always a moment ticking in her heart. A moment in which small pieces of her body are dying, and being remade, and dying again. And there is a moment in which she hangs off the lip of some spectral, incandescent life is she already starting to forget.
So for a moment, in which she is dancing and flitting around that deep well, she debates letting the crowd open up and swallow her whole. Each step she's taking, each sharp peel of metal and flesh, is carrying her downstream to that place where she is smoke, and soot, and magic. All the bodies around her feel like jagged mountains. Al'Zahra feels like the wind ripping through the crags and dead pines, wicked except for the way she brings snow, seed and life to stone.
A thing resting in the coal-dark core of her blooms until her laughter starts to sound like the harpsichord bleating a sad eulogy somewhere in the center of all this snow and flesh. The moment passes, and she turns all her wildness back towards the stallion like a doe who has just found a stream in the desert. At first she is nothing more than a stray touch along his hip, a breeze in his feathers, and
another reckless reveler pressing too close and too feverishly against everything.
At first she stays the wind though the mountain-pass, seeded with thick with a promise of spring. Then her laughter goes as silent as a fog.
“The secret,” she says when she emerges from the crowd to press her ribs to a wing, “is to forget that you are a tangle of sharp bone trapped beneath skin.” Her gold ripples when she tucks her nose to the place where his throat meets a tangle of mane hiding some secret beneath. Each frosted tip of her begins to thaw. Her tail draws quick patterns in the drifts of snow forming in the places where one body ends and another starts to begin. Every inch of her begs to be closer, to find what is looming up from that life she's missing.
The music turns over like a leaf for rain. The snow picks up and somewhere above them the wind is starting to howl between stone walls and dead branches. A drum starts to dream of skin and it vibrates up her bones like an earthquake. Al'Zahra starts to think of flying, of clouds reaching up to run fingers over sparrow feathers. “And then, when you start to think you are only make of smoke and wind, soot and seed--” She runs her nose across the side of his face before she pulls away.
“Then you start to dance.” Her laughter this time feel less like a wildcat lumbering in a jungle. It feels like fire.
And for a moment she is more the promise of a dance than the steps to one.
@
