“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
It is strange perhaps, that she loves the moonless night with its silent snowy owls and its almost cloud-covered stars. Even the air feels oppressive tonight, like it's weight with water begging to fill up the hollow caves of her lungs. The song of her chains is the only comfort in the black-- and the way each link of gold presses against her sharp as the tip of a knife. Because otherwise the night, this moon-blackness, would feel like a memory of her once cage.
This night would feel like suffocating.
Instead, though, it feels like freedom. Tonight the moon and the stars have only tired watchful eyes. Even the leaves of the trees are dead and brittle beneath her hooves with no way to whisper to the roots and the dirt. Everything is hushed with the promise of winter-- everything but the gryphons screaming mournfully in the distance.
Her own heart aches at the sound, the way they sound like they are the last magic things left in his world and they are dying.
Ahead she watches a stag and his doe fade into the treeline, their lungs expelling star-smoke into what small light there is. Bloody bits of fur are hanging from his antlers and she can see the way it makes strange reflections of shadow across his face. And if she didn't know he was a stag she would think some monster was watching her discover what freedoms all this darkness can really hold. Maybe she would even image it the gaze of one of the old gods, the wild ones who have no court but survival.
She's about to follow the stag and his flock when she first sees him. At first the stallion is nothing more than a smear of darker black moving through the grass and she thinks him nothing more than another stag come calling to steal away the doe. But then there is a shine of gold across his shoulder when he tosses his head (or maybe it's only the wind playing tricks on her eyes) and she thinks there is perhaps a secret waiting to be found in the dark stain moving through the grass.
So she follow him at a distance. Until she can see the rib-cage of a dear blooming a garden out of death, and sinew, and rot, she comes no closer. It's almost lovely she thinks, sun-bleached and moon-bare and speckled with flowers she remembers (oh she remembers!) the purpose of.
Al'Zahra remembers when gods first grew that flower and when a mortal plucked it with his teeth. She remembers what happened.
There is a smile on her face when she moves out from the tall-grass towards him. Her own gold sings a song to the silent tracks of it running down his sides. The wind whips through her hair and she can taste salt and winter on it each time she inhales. The taste of settles something in her soul, something wild, something ever hungry as a god.
She exhales, “are you looking for death?”, and the question is nothing more than a sigh and a song of gold. It's like the wind carrying brine, and snow, and rust. And something in her gaze, molten and hot despite the chill, promises that she could offer more than any constellation petal of white-death might.
@erasmus
