Warset, when she awakens, does not remember how she found herself tucked away in the tropical fronds of the oasis. Nor does she recall listening to the bubbling crash of the waterfall like a siren's call last night. And there is on her lips a slash of blood, metallic and bitter, when she tries to wipe the sleep and sand from between them. She tries not to think of the source but when she rises the press of her collar makes her pulse feel like a war drum instead of the beating of her lonely heart.
Each of her bones feels like steel and rust beneath her skin and her feathers shake from themselves a deluge of sand that sounds a little like diamond-dust burying itself back into the earth. The sound only makes her think of dying here in the dirt, so far below her cosmic sisters and their beds woven out of comet tails. Warset turns towards the waterfall, closing her eyes against the molten sting of tears and the roiling nausea of a half-asleep wildcat dreaming between the fibers of her marrow. She lets the ache, and the grinding feeling of sand and fore caught between her teeth, lead her.
And if the grass whispering against her movement looks tempting, her body has no hunger to drive her to lower her nose like a horse instead of a star trapped in an impossible form. Her belly is full of gore and the last remnants of stardust (like a forgotten religion trapped in the form of a girl...just a girl).
The water almost takes her by surprise as it slips beneath her feathers and washes away the last of the blood from her form. The collar around her neck casts reflections between the sun and the water, painting her in a kaleidoscope of color that is reminiscent of a comet's glory crashing through the night. If Warset had looked down to see it she would have sobbed instead of walking underneath the waterfall. She does not look down.
Against her back the water feels like the pulse of the earth pressing into her skin hungry for the last of the starstuff racing through her veins. Warset, as she closes her eyes and starts to slip away into her own thoughts, does not try very hard to keep it from the water. And in the blackness she prays she will not meet the thing dreaming between her marrow.
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