“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
Al'Zahra, for a moment when she watches Morrighan turn back to the lake, wishes for something her hunger has no words for. It blazes a line down her spine, as furious as a lash, and echoes in her voice when she steps close enough to say, “I will not save you if you don't float.” She shivers with the feeling racing down her spine, that nameless beast crawling its way through her soul. And her words, whispered and soft despite their vicious meaning, are the only warning Morrighan will get before she closes the distance between them.
They are the only warning the Warden will ever get.
In her life there have been a hundred moments like this, her form pressing against a curl of smoke, an ember in the dark. She is familiar with the thrill in her blood, the hunger, the fury that has nothing at all do with violence. This is nothing strange, or new, but when she rests her throat against Morrighan's withers, her blood hums a song that is almost as bright to her as a planet kissing the darkness of space. Al'Zahra, the last of her kind, the girl of soot and smoke, vibrates with the brightness of it like a star about to fall.
And even though she wants to lift Morrighan's gaze from the ground, and trace arcane wolfish marks against her shoulder, she doesn't. She swallows down her anger and the words that want to tear out of her throat: be a wolf, don't look down, not ever. She silences everything in her body but her pulse beating slow and steady in the hollow of her cheek, just beneath the skin she's pressing so softly against Morrighan.
There is so much to Morrighan's words, that for a moment Zahra only listens to the echo of her pulse and the words stumbling chaotic from the Warden's lips. Her chains whisper against her skin when she shifts her weight and rests more of it against the spine beneath her neck. She wants to laugh, to kiss the words from Morrighan's lips if only to stop the stuttering melody of them. She wants--
Oh she wants to do so many things.
But she is not a creature made to save anything, so she only wants for the silence to fall once more between them. And then she drags her teeth down Morrighan's shoulder as she pulls away. “It's not magic.” Zahra's teeth flash in a smile, wicked as a siren perched upon a warship prow. Her muscles quiver beneath her skin as the winter chill races back into the places she had been touching her mare made of fire.
And when the hush falls again, she only stands there, waiting to see which direction Morrighan might choose this time. Because it has always been a choice.
Al'Zahra has already made her own.
@Morrighan
