“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
This is a dance she has known since the dawn of time. Every molecule of her body is shifting like soot, light and smoke. Her body feels as if it's nothing more than a tangle of possibilities yearning and aching for the crest of their story. She shivers with the feeling of it-- the sweat, the flame, the spark and the golden glow of hungry eyes at the edge of a crowd. And already each inch of her is wanting for a touch and her hooves are humming with a hundred steps no one knows but her.
She steps closer because she must. There is talk of gods and she's aching and so she must.
“I'm sure Caligo has her reasons.” There is laughter in her voice. Below that there is something close enough to rage and close enough to longing that the two are impossible to unwind. It all comes out like smoke anyway. “Does he have a name?” When she asks something in her unfurls and blooms as brightly as any moon-flower. There is in her look again something wanting, something trembling, something as wild as the leaves burning at the bottom of the fires. Something burning.
Behind her the dance is growing more wild. Mares have their heads tossed back like lions and stallions are dancing between them like tides between the moon and the center of the earth. She can feel the call of it pressing against her skin like a touch. She can feel it urging her to dissolve in the core of it, to become the smoke twisting it all together. When she listens it's closely and when she obeys it starts with a touch to Morrighan's cheek. The touch is soft as a feather and caught between almost-not-there and almost-a-kiss.
Almost. Almost. Almost.
She doesn't say she's glad Morrighan came. She doesn't say anything but, “I can't tell you.”. The look in her eyes is wicked and rimmed in firelight. Each of her chains sounds like a star trembling against the darkness; they sound like falling. “But I could show you.” That sounds like falling too, like Al'Zahra has already tossed her head back to roar like a lion.
The dancers start to touch the edge of their shadows. The dance has grown wild as weeds. To her it seems the only way the night court knows how to do anything, as if it's rabid enough to bite the sky and claim all that blackness like a dying wolf. “And after that I could show you how dancing doesn't tire you out.” She steps closer once more, close enough to trace the space above Morrighan's neck. It's another almost touch, one that promises she knows how to leech every secret from the flames and from the flesh. There is a promise in everything she does.
When she pulls away the crowd seems to rush into the space between them. It's the way the tide rushes the cliffs or the way the leaves rush towards the ground before winter. It's hungry. “I can show you how it makes you feel alive.” And when she presses into the crowd everything from the devilish curl of her lips to the chains singing against her hips seems to chant one song over and over again.
Follow me. Follow me. Follow me..
@Morrighan
