“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
The island is in chaos and everyone else is running for the mainland.
Trees are arcing over her head like comets and vines are following each like shooting stars. The sky is alive with destruction and earth. To her is feels like watching the world be born, like wild constellations have brought low their hands to reshape reality into something bolder, something fierce, something that favors the ruthless.
Around her there are screams as the earth starts to swallow mortals whole, carrying them to the belly of the world that created her. There is fire too where magic has crawled it's way out of the skin of horses to try to save itself (or perhaps the body it loves). And if there are predators running around her she does not notice them in all the glory of the remaking.
The island is in the chaos and Al'Zahra is still dancing.
Over the felled trees laying around her like the torn off limbs of gods she is dancing. There are leaves and vines caught in her hair from the place by the sea where the wind was howling like a dragon. Dirt is speckled down her legs, like freckles and like bird-spots. She's a wild, dirty thing in the chaos, like a creature that crawled out the belly of the earth and screamed at the ocean, today you will not eat me. She feels as lovely as she ever has.
Her hooves feel like wings swooping through the pitching island like it's nothing more than mountains rising sharp and wicked below her. And her gold is almost silent with all the screaming, and moaning, and death-knell symphony going on and on around her. It's a song she'll hear long after this island returns to the sea, long after her bones have finally discovered what it's like to ache and rust beneath her skin.
There is a lullaby under all of that, a hum, and it feel like the pulse of a god moving through her. It feels like it's reshaping her into something new.
She dances until the bridge is bucking beneath her like a serpent trying to shake free from reality. Sometimes she is leaping over bodies that are left behind (that makes her heart feel like winter) and sometimes she is running belly-low to beat a wave of black-stone lava rushing towards her.
Over and over again the island tries to take her with it. Over and over again she crawls away with a playful curl of her neck. not today. Sometimes she turns her eyes behind her where the sea is rushing in like a river of death. And every time she does her eyes say, in sparks of molten god-gold, never again.
STAFF EDIT***
@"Al'Zahra" has rolled a 1! They have been awarded +2 exp.
