“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
The space between them lingers on the edge of silence long enough for her to hear the song in the way Morrighan's tail swings against the bluegrass. She can hear too, the embers floating away on the wind and the way it sounds like black snow falling in soft flakes of madness around her. It all makes her skin quiver like a willow branch. And it feels, oh it feels, like the pieces of her are hungry for just an ember of all that rage, and fire, and smoldering fury.
Her secrets are all on the tip of her tongue. She can feel them building there like a storm, like every bit of her clawing its way out into the world (only the ancient parts, only the dead parts). She swallows and it tastes like ash and summer seeds. She says nothing.
Every inch of her starts to learn forward into that lingering silence between them. The chains on her shoulders start to sing against her skin and sinew. Even as Morrighan lashes her ears back and turns into a cat (a jungle cat she thinks) waiting to strike, Zahra is curling her neck like a snake waiting only to dance a man to his death. “Someday I'll enlighten you. If you promise to come see me dance.” Finally her smile reaches her eyes with sparks of molten god-gold and something like a memory of burning alive.
She steps closer, hoping for the sting of fire or the touch of danger, anything to break this storm-stillness between them. Still there is that itch beneath her skin, a promise of song and running and wildness. There is a memory too, of being a wolf howling at the moon fat with rabbit (but she knows better than to share that). “I come from nowhere in particular.” It's there in her eyes, the suggestion that she knows all the ways in which the wilds are better than walls, titles, and gods with their terrible magic to destroy it all. A suggestion she's all too willing to share is there too, when she steps close enough that their shadows tangle together easy as breathing.
“I came to Denocte because I fell in love with the markets.” Even now she can hear the merchants yelling insults to each other, and the promise of magic in the jasmine smoke. Her chains sigh with the memory when she stretches her head down to lip at the grass even though she has no hunger it can tame.
Somewhere the wolf starts to howl again and again. She can see the mare yearn towards it with something other than fury. Al'Zahra laughs and it's deep enough to be another song for the moon and the sun and all the wilds untouched.
But the city is calling and she's not wanting for a hunt--- not yet. So she only offers a breath of air against the mare's hip (not close enough to touch, only enough to feel) and the words, “And maybe I feel in love with its fires too.”. She's still laughing when she turns to gallop back to the city and all its hedonistic freedom.
And when she dips beyond the hill, Zahra lifts her head back and howls.
@Morrighan
