She is counting the teeth in his beakish smile the moment she can see them. Each is a tally against him, a mark on a list that only a cat can have (sins perhaps, maybe reasons for death, maybe reasons for salvation). The number is upwards to the stars by the time the crow starts to move. She only watches him, a growl swallowed into silence like silence in her throat and a hunger hardly stemmed in her stomach.
Until he starts to write words on the sand like a civilized thing, instead of a black omen of death. And then the child of war sheds the wildcat skin in a rush of shaking skin, bone and gore.
Warset shakes out her feathers and looks down at the words etched in the earth like scars. Her first feeling is rage. Stars are not things to be told to dream. They are the dreaming things. There is a hint of fury in the toss of her head, and the rattle of her feathers sighing like a death knell. It lives in the step she takes towards him and the way she drags a feather across the words to smear them like blood on a battlefield, a line to divide one side from the other.
And as their lines are drawn the oasis dissolves.
It starts with a rush of stardust around them and a comet's tail wrapping around their necks like rope. The comet rope tugs her forward, him with it. It drags them into the freezing blackness between stardust and rainbow, where the light dissolves quick as a current on the river into nothing more than pinpricks of lights. Frosted blackness draws in around her, caresses the curl of her belly, the hollow of her hock, the fragile bones of her wings. It steals the breath from her lungs that don't inhale and exhale as they should here.
She steps forward and it's onto the curl of a planet. A sea pillow her hooves and an atmosphere crowns her brow with teardrops of water and air. A mountain kisses the bottom of her muzzle and a forest brushes against her ankles like meadow-grass. Somewhere a drum starts to bang, and echo, and rattle all the pieces of her still pretending to be a girl loose. Warset looks at the crow and still knows the number of this teeth without seeing him.
Part of her asks why.
Part of her only smiles, with teeth, and walks further across the world kissing the bottom of her wings and doesn't look back again. Because ahead of the universe spans further than any horizon and it is the first time she has felt like herself. Warset starts to sing to that drumming beat of a distant stardust war.
And even when the comet wraps tighter and tighter about her throat she does not stop.
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