Warset notices a hundred almost details. The canopies are a blur of different colors, and to her they seem more suggestion of flight than anything else in this copse of sand and worn wood. Each pair of eyes sliding over their forms as they move through the court are nothing more than pale stars on the outskirts of their orbit. Everything here is a suggestion of something else, even the gravity making each step though the dust heavier than the last. It all races by her like a comet too bright, too fast, too full of fire and stone, to dream of holding on to.
So she lets it all sweep her away into the current of this world. And if her ruby and diamond color is tapping against her neck like another heartbeat she pretends not to hear the way it is whispering soon, soon, soon. The sound of her wings, the market, and their hooves on the sand is not loud enough to drown it out, no wholly.
Ahead, when she lifts her eyes up from the curl of his neck, she can see the sun brushing against the dune and the rose-gold promise of a dead day. Warset trembles against him as her heart races in butterfly wings of hope beneath her chest. She looks towards the sun and towards the shadows with her wings fluttering softly against her sides.
The wildcat in her bones is straining for the shadows, for the dark hallways promising an end to their hunt. But the girl in her, that mortal star, is straining towards the light. They are hunting, she reminds herself, they are hunting a thing of flesh, and bone, and not star-blood. A curse is better for this than a star.
The wildcat lifts up one of her wings in the direction of the dark. Warset's eyes flash, a quicksilver glare that has nothing to do with the screaming gulls and the soft hush of the sea. “To the shadows.” She turns without waiting for him, lifting up her wings to hide the fine trembling of her form as the beast inside starts to wake up.
@August
