If there are signs in the darkness between the stone walls leading her steps, Warset does not know what they are. There is only the instinct to lift her head into the wind and flare her wings wide as a sun as they leave their half-moons in the sand. Here the air smells stale as dust and almost metallic with the tang of old blood. It smells like slumbering violence.
Warset remembers the great cosmic snake. She remembers the sweet bitterness of his breath as he woke his children upon the blood soaked war-lands. The press of his body against her settles the humming song rising in her throat like bile as the memories dig and etch themselves behind her eyes.
The darkness grows thicker as they walk, layers of layers piled onto each other until the walls turn inky and ominous. Behind them rose-gold starts to turn to shades of twilight. Warset trembles against the coming weight of night as much as her bones rattle and rejoice. Soon, too soon, it will not a star with which August hunts. She drapes a wing across his spine, trying to use the heat rising from his form as a noose.
She tries to hold on.
When he breaks up the silence, Warset lowers her nose from the air and her wing from his spine. She steps close enough that her half-moons start to swallow his. The north star whispers down to them as it rises from the twilight. She presses her nose to the bottom of his cheek and pushes his head up, up, up towards the rising stars and moon. And if the gesture seems like a kiss it is only one borne of desperation. “I am from there.” Beneath her skin her scarred up heart trembles and starts to crack around the edges. Her eyelashes whisper against his cheek as she blinks and pulls away. The distance feels like the first cut of her curse as her bones start to crack.
Her ruby pulses blood-red.
Beyond their shadows, in the alley a door slams, and the stallion who pauses in the faint starlight makes something leap in her predator heart. Her bones sound like stones falling in the brief silence. Her feathers tremble as if in a storm as the stallion turns his head to look at them like a wolf. Warset steps closer at the same time the gold-eyed stallion does. And when she lunges towards him it is a fallen star that spreads her wings and jumps into the air--
But it is a leopard black-as-pitch that lands and snarls at the stallion who is starting to flee.
@August
