Here she can feel the world revolving beneath her hooves. Each grain of sand seems like a suggestion vibrating between the present and the future. It's in the market pressing in around them, in the gazes that seems to blink both slower and faster than she thinks they should. Everything presses in against the space around her, like blackness, like stardust, like the endless loop of a noose.
She could suffocate here in the winter heat, drown in the sweat and the dust. And like all children of war who remember the gore and the beautiful silence, she trembles at the power this chaos.
He is the one still thing in the sea, the sun in the storm, the halo of a far off star one only seen from a distance in (the echo of a dream). Warset moves closer to him, because there is a merchant pressing in at her back that makes her think of blades against throats and holes chewed out of blackness so that there might be light. It makes her heart tremble in her chest like a caught leaf on a copse, to move closer to him like he's an anchor and she a broken sail. It makes her feel like a lie, like a half-whispered hallelujah, like a war-song whispered against satin instead of blood.
It makes her feel like girl instead of like a star.
And she hates it.
“I could help you find him.” Warset says the words not because she wants to but because there is a wildcat in her bones that wants to hunt. Each of her words is a wish, a bit of dust in the wind, a broken flag of a dead king turning to strings. Maybe she only said them to remind herself she's a star, a universe, and there is nothing, nothing, nothing, she does not almost remember seeing. The feathers at her side rustle, as if begging for flight, or anything just to stop feeling the sand vibrate under her hooves. She steps closer.
She is bred from the darkness, with stardust instead of blood, moonlight instead of organs and so she does not question that the sunlight makes things brutish and arrogance. Had she not already seen it with the way she's forced to steal just to fill her belly with something other than flesh and blood? Or in the way the merchants are pressing in closer, and closer, and closer, each time she lifts her head in a way that speaks of nobility with the blood of gods instead of mortals. Already her blood is humming, and aching, and racing in a way that has everything to do with survival.
Like a leopard she's been broken down to the most arcane of instincts. And she would like to think it's the curse, but she knows the truth. Oh she knows.
The ring on his nose is almost blinding, moon-silver in the way that her own eyes are. Warset can hardly tear her gaze from it, for it makes her heart thrum with something more than fear and hunger. It's easier to look at than his eyes. She blinks, long and slow, like a jungle creature watching the birds come alive. “They cannot have it.” Perhaps if she knew it carried the wildcat she would have torn it from her neck. But war-children are a hungry sort, and Warset is no less.
And that story is in the quiver of her flesh that shifts from fear to fury and back again.
@August
