from the mind of Chaos’s lonely daughter
and the sun fell heavy and thick
to warm the blood of a world"
Amaunet does not turn to the lion as he snarls with his mouthful of teeth and his predator eyes spilling light like a wound spills blood. She does not look, but her feathers quiver with a thrill older than the sand and stone at their hooves. Beneath her skin her blood races and sparks like lightning, like she's a storm roiling inside the too-fragile form of a girl. Somewhere thunder is echoing like a bass drum, somewhere the sky is cracking open with light, somewhere a spear is glittering in the twilight like an eye watching the world tick, tick, tick by without a cause.
Somewhere, when she closes her eyes, there is another her, another girl with bloody warpaint and a hungry soul, setting match to dead-wood. Somewhere an inferno is starting to smoke.
But here, the king is pressing his nose to her feathers like she's air instead of skin and bone. Here she is tracing the curl of his neck even as the lion snarls on the outskirts of all their touching places begging to become thunder and light. Amaunet whispers a laugh into the hair at his withers. “I think I prefer girl-who-does-not-fear-burning.” Her voice is the desert under the twilight, a strange suggestion of light that hasn't yet turned black as oil. It's a touch, a feeling, a thrill of all the things the darkness brings. And it comes with a tug of his mane, not hard enough to sting but perhaps hard enough to make him shiver.
“Can I keep it?” She pulls away with a quiver, like the coldness has crept in to drag caresses down her spine. Perhaps the coldness is braver, without their fury to rage against it. Perhaps the darkness feels closer than it should, here in the city of the sun (the city that burns again, and again, and again).
The city, that like its king, has yet to discover which direction it needs to follow to find the end.
Amaunet gestures with a wing, a silent follow me, in a language all of them have always known down in the marrow of their bones. Or maybe her feathers are only saying, keep up, or devour me. Or maybe they are only feathers rustling a song in the wind, maybe there is nothing more to it than that.
Her necklace whispers against the silk of her cloak which in turns whispers against the stone (each whisper like a secret to the heart of her being revealed). “Where were you walking to?” Her smile is a heavy thing, weighted with all the somewhere, and here, and almost things that could be between them. The look is bold, too bold perhaps, for the way she takes the name the king has given her, his violence and nothing else.
Always she has been too bold-- blade bold, desert bold, destruction bold. She's restless, here with this moment of stillness between their touches, the poet, and the lion.
“I could walk with you.” Bold. Too bold.
@Orestes
