the sun shines low and red across the water,
She had started watching him the moment he started to look at the deep and dark tunnel. The forest fronds are heavy and noon-dew wet across her back. Here, deep in the woods and the black, she is little more than a glint of moonlight through the thick, sunlight, dappled foliage. The black scales twining up her legs are almost nothing more than another bit of bark rising up hungry through the soil. Even her eyes, coated in black, are made to blend in with the dark leaves and silver-dusted moon-flowers left behind from a time when her mother walked this path.
And as she watches him chase the screaming bats she imagines herself a predator in the tall-grass, flicking her tail impatiently as she waits for the mice and the moles to settle down to sleep. At her side Foras is watching too, shoulders slung low and close enough for the bones of each to brush each-other beneath his bone-white fur. He does not growl or roar. Avesta, if it weren't for the kiss of winter ever racing between their thoughts, could forget he was anything more than a wind blowing in from the distant mountains.
When the boy rears slashing at the golden air (at her air!) she finally moves from the copse of leafy darkness. Foras follows close behind and the grass tickles his fur when he walks between the rocks sprouting weeds. His paws make no sound. Avesta makes all the sound. Her hooves peel out like cracked glass bells on the stone. Her neck makes a hollow curve as she looks up at him and his young cat. Just as her lips are about to crack a smile and her voice is about to sing a dark hello, he speaks.
Avesta does not care for the words he's saying and the way his cub is growling at her.
She does not care for it all. The sea rises in her-- primordial, vengeful, deep, black.
“I will do no such thing.” Her voice is a dull whip-sharp slash of sea-water on the shore. When she tosses her horn it's in a warning arc (a mockery of the way her mother's dragon swings his head whenever he catches her trying to run off again). At her side Foras growls and his fur makes a great ridge down his spine. The place where his paws meet the stones starts to seem more like a suggestion of something like earth, as if the stone has forgotten how to bear weight. His cheeks turn red and slick like tendon and bone.
Avesta drops her nose to the ground and whispers to the loose stones, wake up, wake up. A stone rises to flutter around and around her horn when she looks up at the boy on the ruins again. When she steps forward it's slow enough that he has all the time in the world to watch the way her shoulder moves, her knee bends, and then the way she steps forward like this entire forest belongs to her.
Then she smiles, it's a curl of bone through her black lips. She closes her eyes until her face is nothing more than black scale an moon-bright skin (until she looks like a beast risen from the deep instead of a girl). And when she opens them it's with a whisper of sound softer than the night wind. strike true.. Foras presses his shoulder to her knee. Together they watch the stone soar through the air at the boy and his cheetah like an arrow loosed from her mother's bow. She hopes it might sting the same.
As it's flying towards him she takes another step closer to the ruins. Deep inside her the sea is still roaring, and howling, and slashing at the shore.
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