The stardust in her blood pulls itself into the new-world first. It starts with a bit of light, a flare of moonlight, a shift of silver though the shadows, a coolness where before there had only been molten heat. From her form it rises into the strange place, shifting and watching like a constellation does: all memory and little thought. It has an impression of him first, black on black, silence on a sharp beak.
And then the child of war wakes up. She pulls herself from the moonlight and into the new-strange-world. Feather by feather she moves from the waterfall and the humming of the deserts heartbeat. The sand is strange beneath her feet when she steps onto it: pearl, and stardust. Or is it pearl and dried blood dust? The shoreline changes so quickly she cannot grab an impression of it. Without the constellation she is so much slower to see the world, it's all too close, too full of feeling. It feels like burning even now in the new-strange-world when she presses into the sharp, brittle edges of a frond.
tap, tap, tap.
The child of war turns to look at the bird who does not blink. Something about the tilt of his head suggests language, and something in the flare of his feathers suggests a promise of violence.
That's what wakes up the predator, the knock of violence against a stone and a penetrating black stare that does not waiver. She pulls herself out of the fronds by way of claw and tooth. The shoreline looks like sand, just sand, and sun, and the shadow of a bird on a rock. Nothing looks out of place to her, or hazy, or anything that suggests she is not the ruler of this world.
Somewhere Warset has forgotten that this is the thing she did not want to meet, the thing she did not want to become.
But the predator is ruler here, in the place where horseflesh is not a cage but a conduit. She's devoured most of the star already. Only the child of war is left, the girl who cannot stop saying why over and over again like a wish.
The dark predator ridges the hair on her back. She growls. She steps closer to the bird on the rock and she does not blink. Hungry things never blink. “You are right to be wary,” the flick of her tail says with the hardness of her gaze. She steps closer still, the heartbeat of the waterfall and the desert forgotten (the girl and the stardust with it).
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