“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
Every time she blinks she can still see a spot of land rising from the sea. At night it's color-bright, stained with moonlight and so much hope she feels like she could choke on it. But now, with the dawn rising pink-cheeked and virgin pale, she can only see it in flashes of lighting white. Even now when she stands on the end of the dock it's there, electric and ready to drag her under.
Al'Zahra, the last of her kind, knows that she should pause and wonder. Maybe it's better that she's the last. Maybe it's better than her bones have forgotten their fire and her skin it's incorporeal wonder.
Maybe it's better that she is the last....
The last to know what wickedness lingers below mortal hearts, like blackness lingering beneath the tropic sea.
But today she has forgotten how to be angry, or anything but hopeful and soft beneath the rising sun. The dock feels like a suggestion of hardness beneath her hooves. It feels a little as if the sea is already roiling underneath her and the wind is already blowing a chanting dirge though her tangled hair and her gleaming gold. Ahead she can see the Vercingtorix waiting by his rented vessel and she knows she should hurry before the harbor gets busy with ships heading out to so many places (each of them hurts her heart to think about).
With an inhale, heavy and bloated with that fist of hope wrapped against her throat, she moves through the pink dawn towards the glass-sea. And she hopes, oh she hopes, that all that calmness is nothing more than a promise of something vicious waiting for her. Storm, or sea, or island she wants it all. All. Of. It.
His smile is full of dark promise (just enough to hide all that blackness lingering, she knows) so she smiles back just enough to let her new mortal darkness say a welcome to his. “Wicked ones I hope.” If there is any chivalry to the way he moves aside for her to board she does not see it-- not when it's framed by the young day and the endless sea. With all the space before her, open and wide and waiting, it's almost easy to pretend he said nothing to her but, come.
The rest of the world trickles in, slowly, like molasses and fermented wine. She remembers that he said more than a sigh of come against the curl of her hip as she passes. “Always.” She says around the fist of thorns wrapped tightly around her throat. It comes out like a sigh, like a prayer to the sea where that island waits, colored only in her moonlit dreams. The dock sounds hollow as she walks across it-- hollow enough that a horse closer to the mortal coil might wonder at what things lie beneath such a hungry skin.
But then the wind comes rushing in again, salted mist and brine and wind almost cold enough to howl. It feels like she is running down the shore with a storm gathering deep-bellied and hungry in the distance.
It feels, it feels, it feels--
It feels like so much living that she hardly notices when the ship pulls away from the dock. But the moment she does, the moment she feels the deck roll and sway beneath her--
Al'Zahra, the last of her kind, walks up to the prow, lifts her head into that damp, salted dawn and starts to sing.
And sing. And sing. And sing.
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