It takes her body longer than it should to remember that there is the sand and stone beneath her hooves instead of stardust and blackness. Her heart is racing beneath her chest like wild thing running both to and from the kill. Even her lungs are heaving, aching, humming when she finally remembers to breathe. And when she does inhale it's to the flavor of the market and the sweat on the stallion's skin-- starlight and sun.
Each feather whispers like a leaf in the thick, night forest as she tucks them back to her sides. The chain below her throat swings to a metronome echo of her racing, stumbling heart beat. Somewhere, in the bits of memories between the language of the stars, is the instinct that has her staring too deeply into his eyes. The star in her screams a hello, it clamors against the curl of her ribs, it wants to brush their cheeks together in the way of the war-children stars.
But the part of her that's hungry, that knows what it's like to look at a form running through the sand and dream only of the things beneath flesh, looks at him and screams something darker than hello. Every aching, stumbling heartbroken part of her has her leaning away form his shadow. And when she cocks her head at him it's with the look of a wildcat. “Who?” Perhaps there should be words around the only word her throat can bear to hold, perhaps there should be a hundred other things she knows to say but hasn't yet learned the shape of.
She still has not taken her silver eyes from his.
Night is still far off, and somewhere in the market someone is humming a tune that makes her skin tremble to her it. Warset knows there is perhaps a logic to this madness of horse and hunger, sweat and sand, chaos to song. But she has not learned to divine it in the way she could divine the lives of her sister stars by the rhythm of their light. It's why she finally takes her eyes from his and tells her feathers to cease their whispering. It's why she finally makes hear heart beat like a living thing (instead of like a dying thing). “Why is it like this?” Because if there is a reason to this, to any of this, she does not know it.
And perhaps, for the first time, when her tongue tastes the word why, it does not make her feel lost and forsaken.
