Looking at him is like looking at something wild, something peering out from pale flesh of the mortal coil. She can see it in the way his skin is pulled tight over sinew. Only wild things, only dirty things, only things that know intimately the feel of death between their teeth have skin like that. It's there in the way his tattoos look like brands instead of art. Otherness, she can taste it on him and on the sand lingering salty and terrible on her tongue.
It's why she steps closer.
And closer. And closer.
Closer.
Until she can trace her nose down the golden brands on his neck. She wonders if it's his muscles or his marks that feel ridged and hard underneath her lips. And she wonders if it's the wild that understands her touch or if it's the beast staring at the stone like a map. She already knows what part her recognizes the other in him. Her black magic, her death, her rot is all humming sweetly in her veins-- like it's still looking, looking, looking.
His song, that almost-sea song, settles it and makes it coo beneath her gaunt skin. When she tilts her head towards him she can hear the waves and the promise of darkness. She can hear teeth.
Maybe that's why her smile is as harsh as an angry sun on snow. Her teeth ache between her lips like thirsty blades.
“No.” She says the words against his cheek. Her voice puddles in the valleys of his golden mountains like summer fog, like rain, like lightning caught between stone. Above them her horn is lilting like a song waiting to fall-- all sound and no words but the humming of their wild heart and their heavy bones.
Can he hear the wind through the spindle and bone. Can he hear the promise of a midnight howl? Thana wonders. Always she's wondering. Like death she's wondering.
Her body feels alive between the skeleton of the desert, the rock, the animals hiding from all this brightness and the hawk flying hungry as a dog over their heads. Somewhere a sand snake is screaming. Somewhere a lizard is dying in a shadow. Somewhere. Somewhere. Somewhere.
“Who are you?” Thana asks his skin, because she doesn't need to ask his wild, sea-singing heart.
That part of him she already knows.
@orestes
