the sun shines low and red across the water,
Each of the leaves rushing over their skin feels to her like a kiss whispering, god. Even the thorns peeking through, left by the magic of someone else, feel like teeth carving that word god over and over again in her skin. The maze is singing a siren song tonight in the dark and the wind and the ache of the earth as their hooves sink in.
She wonders if this is what her mother hears: the earth singing to her and begging for a hundred different favors.
Aspara's teeth at her hip drive her on and on and on. Behind them their wolves are still howling at the moon in lamenting notes tinged with more winter than the night can hold. Everything in her is aching and rushing and humming for the center of the maze (and for the violence lingering metallic better her teeth). Between her chest her heart is roaring a siren song. It feels like the sea rushing out through her veins instead of blood. She runs faster, faster, faster because she's a girl with a wolf.
The wall of corn seems like hardly more than an altar whispering that word god when she presses her horn between the leaves. She doesn't wonder at the way it's so easy to whisper to each stalk and sending it off to bend forward onto knees of roots before them. And maybe that makes her terrible, this sea-foam primordial child with her endless hunger for all the world.
Or maybe, maybe, maybe it just makes her the sea instead of from the sea.
She's about to ask which way to go, once they get to the other side, but there's a cry in the air. It sounds like something dying and the sound of it should make her shiver when something in Foras cracks open and answers back. But the sound only sends something dark and electric running in roots down her spine. “Do you think that scream is coming from the center of the maze?” And even as she asks the question she knows her sister will see the dangerous current running through her blue eyes. It looks a little like hunger and a little like hope.
Moonlight catches on the spear of her horn, a reminder of all the ways in which they are both born for that whispering promise in the leaves. Below it Avesta smiles when the bent corn stays bent and awake and terrible. When she draws a line in the dirt with her hoof it looks as sharp as their wounds and their hunger, like a wound carved into the marrow of everything. She goes to move, to hurry towards that screaming thing in the distance--
But there is another sound on the wind. The corn trembles with it like sentries waking up from the deep sleep. There is the smell of char rising in the air and Avesta knows who is yelling from them. And who will take them home--
If she can catch them.
Foras presses closer and winter nips at her hocks with the touch of him. Avesta can feel his thoughts more than she can hear them, it feels like war pressing towards her in the dead of winter. He's young but when he smells the wolf, just a wolf, behind them there is something ancient in him that starts to call. Come It's telling him, over and over just as the leaves had whispered to her, come
“We can't let her catch us.” A whisper, softer almost than the rustle of her corn army. Because she's worried that ancient thing in their wolves might open up something in their young hearts that will never seal shut.
Avesta starts to gallop through the maze leaving a trail of woken up stalks in her wake.
@
