“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
She wants to tell the mare that wolves follow their prey. Or that beasts tease and taunt so that the feast becomes sweet. There are a hundred things she could say about wolves. She knows how they were made, bones of the earth clawing up to wear the skin of the rabbits they feast on. She could talk about how they need to eat the soft-furred things over and over again so the earth can't claim their bones back.
And she knows about the magic in the blood of a wolf, the way it's hot and wild and powerful.
But she says nothing more than, “perhaps”, and it comes out soft enough to be nothing more than a sigh shared between skin and gold (or two mares that know things about fire). A whisper of a smile curls her lips, although the look in her golden eyes is to dark for any smile to reach. They watch the mare like molten gold in the center of the earth, like god-blood, like everything bright in the universe smelted down and sipped like wine. And when the mare burns a little more of the earth away, and char rises up like dead fireflies, Al'Zahra does not step any closer even though she wants to.
She wants to feel the black against her skin. She wants to remember, if only for a moment, what it felt like to be ash on the wind over the seas and the mountains. Remembering, though, is a dangerous thing for her. It's like longing, like drowning in water when all she wants is the grind of salt between her teeth.
“Ah Morrighan,” she says it like another sigh, another blaze of moonlight in the bright of day. “sometimes it's the things beneath all the noise that tell you how exactly how to hunt a wolf.”. When she laughs it's loud yet sweet, like woodland creatures all singing at the same mother moon. There is something dark in it, something like the dark spaces between the moon and her north-star (milky light that ebbs and blazes all at once).
Bits of ash float up around her when she finally steps close. They catch in her chains like flakes of rust and ancient rot. “But you would be correct. I am not from Denocte.” She doesn't offer where she's from though, because gods do not give up their religion freely.
Just like they don't give up their fire either.
@Morrighan
