The morning is wicking the night off her skin and the sun is leeching the hunger from her hollow feeling bones. Each time she licks her lips the taste of fur and blood is fading. As she walks, head low into the sweet grass, the pollen is washing away the stain, the burn, the fury of the predator lurking in her bones. And oh, oh, oh, those bones still feel the ache of becoming and the stiffness of steep mountain hunting. Warset feels like an ancient thing moving through the meadow, more like chewed out blackness (spit down, down, down to the earth) than the light behind the darkness.
How long has it been since she's felt like a star, a comet, a wish blazing hope across the dark battlefields of the cosmos?
How long? How long? How long?
Had it not been for the scream of the eagle she would not have looked up to see him. She had heard the whisper of his wings, of course, but the leopard, the fury, and the loneliness was still too new for her to want to look at him. Only her feathers had sung at the sound of him in the sky, a welcome softer than the wuff of her breath through the new-spring grass. If her heart is aching, if it's screaming, there is nothing in the hollow way she carries herself through the grass (all content predator and nothing of bird) to give it away.
And if it were not for the scent of blood, of violence, held in the air between him and the eagle when he lands close to her, Warset would not have lifted her head like a lion finding a wolf instead of vole. Instantly her wings spread out, a challenge as ingrained in her as the flicker of a star is imprinted in its fire. The blood-red moon on her neck ticks against her pulse when she lifts her head towards him. Once there would have been a story in the meeting of two constellations, once there would have been light.
Now there is only the silver-blaze of her mercury eyes, looking at him like a dead star looking at a bit of moon dust fallen into the grass. And there is only the echo of her voice, whisper thin below the roar of her feathers. “Why did you let it go?” Warset is curious of course, of the bloody marks running down his chest.
She's curious because she wouldn't have let the bird go.
And she's not sure why.
