“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
For the first time Al'Zahra does not mind the way the sun hangs bloated and red in the sky. Beneath it the flowers are blooming endlessly with fireflies ducking confused between their petals. A doe is nosing around her heavy with child. The meadow seems lost in time with owls soaring over sunflowers and fireflies lighting up the garden like small, lost solar flares. Between it all she is running fleet-footed and belly-low like a lost god. She does not think about how cool, or dark the night could be on her summer damp skin.
She is imagining she is fire streaking under the sun, a flare of heat singing every night-creature lost in the daylight. And if her chains are singing at all it is a piper-tune cutting through the knee high flowers (but she does not pause to see what might be following). On and on she runs, past doe and owls and a lone wolf stalking through the grass like a ghost. Nothing makes her slow. She is the wind; she is smoke.
She is endless.
It's not until a path of scorched grass breaks up the green grass that she slows. Something in her aches to see the smoke and smell the char. Something breaks. Zahra slides to a walk and drops her nose to black mark after black mark. She follows them like a map of dark suns, although her stride is to light and dainty to follow them perfectly. Her sides, frothed and coated with sweat heave with some emotion she is not brave enough to name when a plume of smoke rises above the crest of her hill.
Zahra turns towards it, hungry with curiosity and full with memories. But if she expected to find anything at all when she pauses on the top, it was not a mare with rage in her eyes. Her head lifts back, almost insulted with the shout like a doe startled by an elk crashing recklessly through her thicket. She smiles but it is nothing more than a quick, sly arch of her dark lips. “I imagine that a wolf might be off seeking voles and rabbits in the grass.” When she steps closer it's slowly and her eyes spark golden with amusement (and a little wickedness). “I've never known a predator to be shouted into existence. Have you perhaps tried hunting like a lion instead of like a dragon?” Zahra wants to laugh, she wants to run again like a lost god, she wants to follow the burn marks towards something more than an angry mare. But all she does is cock her head like the owl flying over them and wait for more grass to burn/
@Morrighan
