“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
At first there is only the crowd pressing in against her like flies and carrion birds. Each time she steps there is another hip, another shoulder, another set of lips pressing into the curl of neck. For a moment there is only the dance, the hunger, the music rolling over them in waves of magic, the weakness of mortal will and want. All her edges beg to dissolve into it, to be the air in their lungs and the magic in their hearts.
Below that her heart, oh her wicked ancient heart, begs her to consume each and every drop of this profane dance.
Someone presses too close, she cannot feel fire beneath their skin like a pulse, and so she answers them with tooth, and hoof, and chanting chain. It feels like scratching an itch, like she's the wolf in a den of rabbits bedding down for winter. Everything in her sings until her blood is racing, racing, racing through her veins in a song louder than the drums ringing in her bones. She starts to hum.
She's still humming by the time Morrighan finds her in the crowd. It feels like there are hornets in her chest, thousands of them, rubbing their wings together and begging for water. If she smiles, if there is any look on her face but one of hunger and recklessness, it nothing more than a flash of teeth (part welcome and part claiming). Her steps slow and turn. The chains across her rib-cage settle their wild song and pick up a new tune. It sounds like the smolder of fire, like kindling drying out in a spring copse. It sounds like--
It sounds like all the fury and wrath she can see waiting just below Morrighan's skin.
And oh she wants to let it loose, she wants to watch the entire world go up in flames. She turns to smile into Morrighan's hip and she drags her teeth along the curl of it. If there is a number of lines she must draw across the Warden she will discover it. With her nose she traces the pathway of Morrighan's spine, of her neck. She follows the hungry snake waiting underneath her form. “The trick is to almost let it carry you away, just enough that your lungs feel full of smoke and her heart feels like a lion beneath your skin.” Al'Zahra says the words right into her ear, knowing that if she doesn't move away that her chains will sing their song over and over again in that too-small space between their skin.
She laughs and it has nothing at all to do with humor. It has everything to do with fire, and dancing, and getting lost in the fury of both. “You go until you feel like you might die in the grasp of the music. And then,” Her eyes are flashing golden suns in her eyes when she pulls away. There are a hundred promises in that look of hers, a hundred secrets are arcane as the gods before the gods. It's feral, and starving and furious all at once. She inhales. She trembles.
She closes the distance in something that looks like the most graceful sort of desperation. It's a lovely gesture, horrifying but beautiful. “Then you start to slow.” The words form themselves into another sort of dance.
Or maybe they just sound like a prayer that the world will burn, burn, burn.
@Morrighan
