“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
A look in her eyes suggests that each secret, each part of her beneath all this earthy skin and golden shine, is worth more than any temple in which a god is trapped. She doesn't let her smile brighten, or let anything more than a sigh slip past her lips (like a promise of a shiver). But it's there in the way she looks at him like he's a feast in a dark wood when the winter is blazing in over the mountains.
It' looks like hunger, like starvation, like she's not going to be quiet when she crawls between his bones.
She wants to lean forward and burn through all these mortal trappings like tables, and silk, and the candles on their table pooling soft light in their cracking smiles. She wants to be nothing more than two wild-dogs in the desert with the dunes hot under their paws and sand an endless sting in their eyes. They could run, oh she can see it in his devilish smile and the garnets hanging from his horn like one long drop of blood defying gravity. They would run. And run, and run, and run.
Until his lungs exploded between his ribs.
“I would.” She says and her breath pushes the candle flame towards him like a small beast just learning that it's hungry. Smoke rises up between them, thin and black enough that her vision blurs when she stares too hard at the way it rises towards the ceiling. She blinks and in the black a million stories flash in flares of painful white. But--
But in the end there is only one thing she wants to tell him. It's a story, of course it is, but it's a promise too. It's a bit of sound that she knows will etch itself between all that bone and sinew she wants to learn. It'll burrow in like rot, like fire,like hunger (always like hunger). She rises up from her sea of silk like a wave, like a naked thing being born from sea-foam and ground down oyster shell.
Al'Zahra moves towards him like smoke, like a song. Her chains sing to him, a siren melody of treasure, and adventure, and a beast lurking in the black deep. When she's close enough she drops her nose to his ear. She inhales just once to smell the desert, blood-stone, and violence on him. And then she exhales.
“I could be a god.” And if there's a lie in her voice, it's only the way that her lips pull at his mane as if to say am instead of could.
@Anatoly
