“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
It is, perhaps, the last truly warm night of the season. The fires are roaring alongside her shadow like beasts waking up from some great slumber. Smoke is rising between the dragons ever grasping gemstones and bits of stolen gold in their claws. Fire catches on the glitz over and over again until the space above her head, in the black, looks more like a storm of falling stars than a night lit only by a dying moon.
All of it-- the fire, the glimmering not-stars, the smoke, the heat that's almost too hot-- makes her feel like a pagan. Her steps are doe-light as she dances and dances and dances until her sides are briny and as white frothed as a wave. The crowd and the other girls dancing like fairies around the golden, hot space of her are a welcome press of mortality.
Each time she feels their skin her heart races. Every time one pauses, just long enough, to look her in the eye like lions looking at the wold among them she trembles as finely as dew in the wind.
Oh she feels alive!
And reckless, and dangerous, and like a wolf who knows the winter is coming and the rabbits are fading as quick as the leaves.
For hours she dances like a bohemian, dreaming doe. Between the girls she dances, brushing close enough to startle them when they all pause to look too long at the boys guarding them ferociously. Her neck curls playfully when a lyre starts to cry. The gold around her ankles and her shoulder sings a sad note when a poet opens their mouth to rain out sorrow. She twists and sways to the lyre and the lyrics until her own throat aches with a hundred emotions she's almost forgotten how to feel.
It's not until a lull in the music that she realizes a desert has long since grown in her throat. She turns towards the merchants and the further back crowd that hasn't yet lost themselves to hedonism. It's the spirit seller that catches her eye first, he's just wild enough to look like he's stolen his wares from the belly of the mountain. Wild enough to make her wonder.
But then she spots the golden stallion, pale enough to be sand and dapples like he's standing in the forest instead of between fires, smokes, and so many bodies. She moves towards him, steady as a predator, with nothing more than her singing gold and frothed sides to suggest she is the wildest one in the crowd.
As wild the wind, even. More wild, surely, than the fires that keep only to their coal bottomed pits.
Al'Zahra smiles even though her throat is still screaming for something cold. And when she says, “hello.”, the sound of her voice is raw and rusted enough to be more a midnight promise than a greeting.
@August
