the sun shines low and red across the water,
The black-sea is rising against all her youthful, innocent bones. It's black as ore and as salted as a hundred desert tears. It's an endless storm in the silence between their rocks turned to weapon instead of earth. And it's fluttering inside her over and over again like a wave against the shore. Like it wants her to fly, to soar high above the earth like a god with not religion. She feels like an undiscovered beast, something more than a girl born of royalty and magic.
At her side, Foras, watches the boy and his silence is no storm. He is ice white, bone white, death white and each tip of his hair seems like a suggestion of snow and reality. We could make the stairs clench at his legs like snakes. The wolf says with no more than a touch of his frozen nose against his unicorn's knee. Avesta's only answer is a sickle smile, moon-bright and pale. She does not need to reply, he knows her soul (the dark of it) better than she does. The boys comes tumbling down the stairs they say nothing more about stairs-- even when his rock bruises her skin.
A beast in her snarls and still she does nothing more than smile her scythe smile and wait for him to come tumbling down the stairs like a young wildcat wishing it was a lion.
Avesta has been raised by a dragon. She already knows how to be a lion.
And so when he laughs with his snarling cub she only cocks her head like an eagle looking down at a rippling lake. Her horn is as dark as his antlers are gold and she rejoices that she is not so dipped in brightness. She steps closer, fearless as a dragon, and her horn cants to tap out a single sharp note against an antler. Her bruised hip throbs like a reminder of their weapons.
Foras doesn't snarl back at the wildcat. He only looks on quiet, and curious, and dangerous, like a monster looks at sunlight and wonders at the awful warmth of it. But when Avesta steps closer he follows at her heels like a shadow that hasn't learned yet how to be dark. Soon--
She pauses to look at his wings (like a promise that hasn't yet delivered) and his golden eyes (like trapped young-suns). Artemis, he says. It reminds her of a story her mother told of a hunter running as fleet-footed as a doe after a hound. She thinks she would never want to be destined for the holly and ivy, dirt and root. Yet she doesn't correct him when she steps closer still.
Avesta blinks and she knows that her eyes are nothing more than a smear of darkness on her pale, dappled face when she does. On her brow her horn aches like wanting thing. “And if I took it from you--” She opens her eyes and is so very glad they are of the sea instead of the sun. “would you still think me pretty?”
Her gemstone and lace necklace sighs against her skin when she shakes her heard. Avesta does not think she wants to be pretty. Tame things are pretty and she is so very, very far from tamed.
Inside her chest her heart trembles like a caught hawk.
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