“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
The last of her kind does not turn to look at him when he speaks. Rather she only looks out to the horizon with her song rolling over the sound of him like wave. Once she would have sung until mortals walked into the edge of her armageddon. Maybe it's in the way her voice rises to a fever pitch when he talks, maybe it's in the way her words are nothing more than the hum of a thunder too far off to feel--
And maybe it's all in the look she gives him when the silence calls, the way her eyes seem to whisper, fall, fall, fall.
“You would be wrong.” There is ire in her gaze, ire and iron, and a hundred other flickering flames that promise to be harsher than the sea below their bellies. She turns towards him with her teeth aching beneath her feral smile, aching to pluck the sound of a question from his lips. A breeze whips through her hair and chains, and it sings a lament that there is no thunder rolling of her tongue like magic anymore. Her hooves sing a drum on the hollow belly of his ship when she goes to Torix. She wonders if he can hear the war in it, the want, the way she's more than a girl from a another land.
And when she presses her lips to his neck, she doesn't tell him that she's from more than this world. She doesn't tell him that she remembers when the gods were young. She do anything but hum that far off thunder melody to the pulse rushing too mortal, too weak, too full of everything she hates, below the sheen of his skin. Below the humming are the words, more storm than girl, “but we could trade secrets, if you're brave enough.”
Her eyes are blazing in the bright shine of her smile when she pulls away. They are are wildfire roaring across the virgin sea, all soot and ember that know it belongs to the wind and never the waves. She can feel the echo of his pulse against her lips when she looks at the island drawing closer, closer, closer. To her it looks like a beast on the horizon, a dragon, a hydra, a creature almost older than her fragile soul.
Al'Zahra does not ask him for a secret, nor does she offer one. She only has eyes for the island now that it has appeared. Beneath her skin her heart, her soul, her mortal organs are screaming for her to turn back. But she only laughs at the feeling of a lightning running below her skin (it feels like touching Morrighan, like watching her run from their touches like a doe instead of a wolf). It feels like freedom.
Freedom or death. Once she had thought the words, over and over again between the bars of her cage. Once she had wanted death.
But now, now, now
Oh now, when she looks back at Torix with that siren, sea-foam laughter tumbling from her like blades, she is more than a girl, more than a wolf, more than a dancer. She is more than other, more than godly. She is the sea, the flames, the stone and root given flesh and form. She is all of it-- everything.
“Are you brave?” She says it like the answer matters at all to her. It's too late for him, too late for both of them. Because the island has already swum across the horizon to greet them.
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