“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
It would be so easy, when Morrighan starts tracing lines down her neck, to toss her head and turn her chains into a noose to hang around the Warden's throat. The godly part of her, the violent beast settled into her bones, thinks it would be as easy as blinking (as easy as burning). And when she quivers beneath the touch it has nothing to do with lust, and everything, every single thing, to do with wrath older than the bottom of the lake.
It is why she answers the touch with one of her own, a feather whisper of air to the smoke and fire coiling beneath Morrighan's skin. Fire spreads around them, spreading out to meet itself a circle. Zahra sees it for the snake it is, the trap it is. There is violent passion in the flash of her teeth as she rises them back to the mare's ear. Fury drips of her in a cacophony that sounds so much like a stutter of her lungs in heart, a fragile sound so full of everything colored red, that it seems nothing more than a shell cracking.
Maybe this is why fire is the same color as a cracked open vein in the noontime. Maybe this is why fire and love are so often twisted together (almost grotesquely) in poetry. Maybe this is only how old things love, with a ferociousness that seems both desperation, and hate, and demand all at once.
Whatever it is has her pressing back, dragging teeth along the outside curl of Morrighan's ear, and whispering. “This world was mine,” There is savage ruin in the rasp of her voice, a cliff edge and a razor edge begging the Warden to wander a little closer to the abyss. She inhales the smoke, lets it almost choke her (like a noose, like a golden chain pulled taunt). “before it belonged to the gods.” Her words suffocate themselves in Morrighan's hair, falling into the silence below the hiss of the fire.
The whole world could burn, and suffer, and never rise again. Al'Zahra would not be sad to see it go.
“It was mine.” And the way she says the words, with a kiss pressed above an artery leading right into Morrighan's heart, makes it seem like it is not world she's talking about now. This brutal world, mortal and withering, hold very little appeal for her now. How pale it seems in comparison with the feeling of a noose held tight between her teeth.
How hungry to burn.
@Morrighan
