How strange it is to look at him, with his nervous laughter and his black looks, and feel like we are something more than two horses passing in a dark alley. Now I can see it and name it for what it is, all this rage beneath our skin. It's hunger black and gnawing and ravenous with a belly as deep as the history of my court. When I step closer I pretend it's to see the reflection of my horn made strange in the shine of his glasses. Always I'm pretending now, acting like I'm not a god that wants to swallow up all this black in the world.
It's not why I moved closer.
I wanted to smell the forest on his skin. I wanted to see if I could pull the notes of ash and fury from the space between his feathers. I wanted, oh I wanted, to see if our beasts would growl at one another if we brushed skin to skin like leaves in the wild. Mine is silent though, drowned deep in the sea of motherhood and all this civility I'm smiling with. Maybe there should be a crown upon my brow now, maybe it would tame this thing in me faster than motherhood does.
He makes me think of a story when he laughs. And how long as it been since anything has reminded me of a legend? There is something of war in this eyes and the aftermath of it in the way his wings fold up like forgotten dreams. I almost wonder if he might be as dangerous as I am, but I know nothing is anymore. I wonder if I should step close enough for all our darkness to really touch.
Could the world even survive it?
But I remember again that shroud of motherhood and peace that should be tucked tightly around my violence. Peace, the world even sounds brittle when I think it, like thin glass trying to hold Fable back from the sea. “But--” There is a smile on my face, I hope, when I echo him. And in my eyes there is a knowing that seems to say beneath an ear titled back towards the fires, I dare you.
Maybe he's brave enough to look at the sea in my chest, and the war in the curl of my neck, and the moon-fire in my eyes, and tell me all the reasons why.
My blackness purrs beneath my skin like a young lion testing out the sharpness of its teeth. It wants me to tell him that he's right, that I'm the queen who went to war and learned all the ways in which a man can be a coward. But I only smile dip my horn like a bloody sword dipping through a pool of water (as if it's not only washing off the blood). The times when I would have run from a look like his, from a man with softened war carved into his skin, seem more like a dream each day.
How was I ever not this fearsome thing, this creature made to create and conquer? How was I ever a ghost?
I brush past him to the place where the silk is waving again in the heavy air like silk should. It feels like a touch across my spine, like one of Eik's kissed laced with clover and lilac. I do not need to pretend at the softness of my smile then (or the quick taming of my beast of rage). “I have all the time in the world.” I say the words like I'm giving him the greatest secret there is-- how to take time, and time, and time, like a thief.
“What would you like to see first?” The diamond grass waivers between the edges of my faint shadow. Diamond becomes copper and steel and stone black as his skin. It looks sharp and full of deadly promise.
I do not wonder if he's brave enough to cross it.
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