When the crow disintegrates and explodes into a shower of blood-red rust, something buried harsh and shallow beneath her skin breaks with it. The jagged pieces races though her blood, her marrow, her organs. They echo beneath the moonlight of her gaze, shards of blackness breaking off from her pupils. The sensation of shattering is so normal to her that she thinks no more of it than a wolf at the coldness of a doe an hour after the last drop of blood has leached into the roots like summer rain.
There is no second crow to replace the first, only the sun highlighting his edges like a halo. And for a moment her gaze catches on that line between gold and darkness. She looks at it like it is the line of a horizon she's been waiting to discover. If there is a wrongness to the shine between his spine and wing she does not notice it, not with all that wet gold.
She's as fluid as a river, as the sea, as a breeze too weak to move the tangles of his mane, when she moves closer. There is warning in her own skin, a shiver, a tremble, a rustling of feather and hollow bird-bones. It's the look of something lost, something caught between hunger and some nameless, molten longing. There is a beauty in the almost-sorrow, almost wanting, that hangs from her expression like lace.
There is terror too, perhaps, when the sun sends her shadow reaching long and shallow for his.
Stars have always wanted this closeness, this brush of light to darkness, fire to icy stone. Perhaps it's the most mortal part of her, the craving of skin to skin, the hollowness of a loneliness that is as endless as a chasm with no bottom. And perhaps, later, she'll say it's the mortality of this form that made her step closer to him on the empty shoreline. The sand sounds like whispering silk beneath her hooves.
The curse in her begs for another crow, another cool slip of seaweed down her throat, a burn from the gold still clinging to his skin. Her ruby moon swings in the same breeze singing to their feathers and echoing off across the white-water curls of the tide.
It all feels like crashing, like falling out of orbit, like watching a cord lash in the darkness before grabbing it with lip and tooth.
“Because,” Her voice reaches for the hoarseness in his voice, the simmering ink of it, like it's nothing more than another bit of weed. “nothing is ever the same after it falls.” The snap of her wings is stark against the clarity of her voice, a wound in the skin of something as beautiful as it fragile.
Beneath her skin, the leopard starts to snarl. The gulls still sing of despair above their heads. And her lips start to tingle with the need to hum, and sing, and soar between those spaces between hunger and sorrow.
@Caine
