She tries not to think about how strange it feels to follow the sun instead of the tail of a comet or a bass bellow of a war-drum beat out with the fiery pulse of a star. And she tries not to linger on the vibrating sand beneath her feet and the gravity turning her feathers to blades made of lead at her side. Warset tries not to think about a hundred things: the dust pooling in her eyes like cosmic waster, the merchants and their mortal grotesqueness, the way the crowd presses in like maggots instead of silvery specters of moonlight.
But no matter how hard she tries it rushes in like a swarm of beasts, each thought rooting inside her bones like a maggot instead of a flower. Each eats her alive, grounds her, turns her into a thing of sand and stone instead of light and stardust. Warset presses her nose to his hip as she follows him and revels in the heat of him because it makes her feel like fire, like starlight, like a thing not caught in a cage.
If the urge to touch, to combine the bits of them into a newborn constellation is abnormal Warset does not know it. This feels natural, to press their skin together like two pieces of the same story and think only of the whole not the individual. With her skin pressed hard into the bone beneath his skin she can almost close her eyes and feel like she's back in the blackness between the pinpricks of life.
He feels like an old battleground: honor, golden, frothed with heat, hungry.
There is only silence to meet his words at first, only her following him like the frayed end of a rope wrapped around his throat. There only the mercury blaze of her eyes when he turns to look at her. There is only them. Until.. “I am Warset.”. She stresses the war without realizing it, without knowing the way her eyes flare like a falling star burning to death as it races for the desert. Her teeth ache beneath her lips and she's not sure how to make it all stop. So she presses those to his hip too, like a hungry thing trying to ground herself into the soil and hidden magma.
Nor does she stop follow him, not even when the question why starts to grown inside her thoughts like a a thorn-bush. Warset, only presses her skin closer to his and follows him through the merchants, the sun lowering each moment, and the heat towards the hunt.
And she tries too keep all the rooted deadly thoughts in the dirt of her gravity stricken wings and all the thoughts of hunting and war in the star part of her still dreaming, floating and singing in the black sky.
@August
