from the mind of Chaos’s lonely daughter
and the sun fell heavy and thick
to warm the blood of a world"
The twilight has long since started to settle on the horizon, darker and darker shades of blue and purple bruising the sunlight like a fist. Something about the weight of it settles an itch she didn't realize was creeping down her spine. Like an almost settled thing, bloated on the tonics of the wealthy, she prowls the closing market like a queen walking through a graveyard.
Somewhere the gutter rats, the poor, and the fools are gathering for another night of blood and lust. Somewhere a Davke child is laying blade to throat with hopes to crown himself by a bonfire. Somewhere there are a hundred other things happening outside this sleepy market and its merchants with greedy eyes. And when she closes her eyes Amaunet is somewhere else too, a match in her grasp and a deadwood forest in her shadow.
In the distant a band starts to play and a poet starts to sing. Her spine starts to itch again and even the weight of her cloak and regalia (the one that marks her as almost queen of this stretch of gutter) do little to soothe the burn and scratch of it. Each bit of gold on her feels like a blade sinking in, like a bit of stone woven into her mane before she's tossed into the sea. Amaunet want's to toss each of them into the fire, smelt them down to arrow and sword.
Tonight in the twilight she longs for the desert, and blood, and anything that makes her feel alive, alive, alive.
Tonight underneath the bruised sky she wants to feel anything but tame. Anything at all is better than tame, even dead. Her wings flutter and spread out, swallowing up the space around her a warning to a lingering rat scuttling too close. But there is longing too, in the tremble of them in the cooling spring night as if they've been bound up in chain. She presses herself into the gathering crowd just to settle the feeling.
And if eyes linger on the girl with her wings spread wide as a queen of violence they are not foolish enough to say anything to her. Wise of them, with the darkness brewing in the corner of her golden gaze like a bloodstain on a bit of virgin silk. For a moment though, when the poetry turns to song, that her itch starts to blaze like a line of soot and ember. Amaunet turns.
She smiles, a star-bright look that airs on the side of feral. It's a look that promises a hundred terrible, perfect, impossible moments. It's a look that might cleave thrones from the hooves of men. “My king.” The distance between them trembles like her wings as she closes it and lifts her head instead of dips it like a decorous citizen might. Beneath her golden banded and braided hair, the gold of her eyes blaze and the bloodstain spreads like cracks in a vase.
And when a feather brushes against him, like a wayward hair caught in a breeze, Amaunet only blinks long and slow as a startled thing while the bruised twilight starts to feel as heavy as a dying thing.
@Orestes
