from the mind of Chaos’s lonely daughter
and the sun fell heavy and thick
to warm the blood of a world"
When the girl started to dance with the rest of them, Amaunet spared a glace only for the soft golden glow of her skin and the brine sticking to that. It was a there and then gone look, the same way she might have looked at a young noble outside the fighting ring. Soon the dancing carries her away, the ebb and flow of the dancers, the promise of the dark twin to violence in the curl of the hips pressing against her.
It's almost like fighting, this press of bodies around the bonfires. It's almost like survival.
The girl from before moves closer, this time her lips at the curl of someones neck. And this time Amaunet can see a shiver in the girl's skin. There is no look in this world she knows better than this one-- hunger. She can see it in the red-light glow of the fire on the girl's golden skin, hunger enough to devour a crowd. Beneath her skin the magic starts to hum, and plead, and sing a siren call for the hunger close enough to touch.
She follows when the girl pulls away from the dancing tide. She stays close as the girl dissolves sugar pastries on her tongue instead of form and flesh. She stays nearby as the girl stops at the tailor's booth. It's only once the girl allows a scarf to be wrapped around her throat that Amaunet closes the distance between them. Her chains make a chiming sound as she shakes out the last of the bonfire ash from her feathers and her blood-red cape.
And she almost laughs to see the blushing shyness of the girl as she talks to the merchant. Almost.
Instead she only slides closer, her magic tapping against the memory of hunger. The girl turns to her, with her bit of moon-kissed silk, and her golden eyes. Amaunet smiles softly, all her wildness tucked down below the chaos of her magic. “I've always been partial to red.” Her voice is desert and sun stained as it rings softly in the same tone as her gold chains and her whispering feathers.
The merchant turns his gaze to her. His eyes brighten at seeing the mark of wealth on her and the wrath dancing in her eyes like a faint, black shadow, smiles. He knows this dance well. He knows it as well as Amaunet does.
“Keep it if you like.” She drops a few gold coins on the table, each dented strangely on the sides (ancient almost). The merchant scoops them up greedily even as Amaunet turns her focus fully away from him and onto the silver girl. “Call it a gift.” There is a weight to her look, a promise is the rusty scrape of her voice, and the glimmer of bloody paint swooping across her face like a wound.
And there are a hundred more unspoken things when she steps closer and says, “I'm Amaunet.”
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