She knew someone like him, once.
Knew him to her bones, holds him there for safekeeping.
She shifts, stilling in mid-step, an argent hoof lingering in the buttery air a fraction of a second longer than normal. Long enough for her skin to ache in rippling shivers from the primordial core of her, the same thing that had told her to run from the oily, lamplit foreboding of those cobbled streets, so many moons ago. Urged her to forgo the traitorous trappings of flesh and searching, fervid spirit; to resist the sable rapture that had divulged from her demure soul, stitch by fragile stitch, the rayless territories of her continent.
But she hadn’t run.
Foolish girl.
Her fluted ears tilt to catch the sound of displaced grass – the purl of soft, soundless nothing as it splits the incipient dusk. Hush. Quietness, so full and complete; so softened by the scent of foxglove and bee balm and… Him. All of him, so when he forms from the strange darkness that snarls and unsnarls around him – from him, beyond and beside him – she swears it too has its own perfume, there against the male redolence of horsehair and old sweat. Adusk and piquant, all-consuming in the way she knows only darkness can be.
She blinks, nostrils widening, pink and aquiver, muscles tight as springs held between apprehensive fingertips; as lightning behind a thin veil of pressure and cloud. Waiting. Expectant. Leaning, as they seem to do in the fading swell of flowers and ebbing sun, to better see the breathy make of each other in his eclipse. You are new, he says, and she nods, watching, with keen interest, the coils of his swart coming to meet the gloaming lavender of her shoulderblade. “Yes,” she concedes – and not for the first time, her newness makes her feel small. “Is it so obvious?”
She swallows hard.
Her breath comes in slow, rhythmic heaves.
That floodlight-gaze. They could be brethren, this moon-branded man and he-of-honeyed-savagery. They could be two of the same matrix; cast in the forge of far beyond this plain, where moonlight goes to die and starlight fails to be. Except her. For, somehow, of moon and stars, she grows vivid and wild root-systems in their darknesses. “Novus,” it has a name. A frail, newborn thing, something she cannot – will not – bring to her breast as eagerly as she had Edana. Not again.
“Who are you? What are you?” reverential and guarded, she bends inwards, towards, away – unable to quite resist the glance of shade across her throat.
Knew him to her bones, holds him there for safekeeping.
She shifts, stilling in mid-step, an argent hoof lingering in the buttery air a fraction of a second longer than normal. Long enough for her skin to ache in rippling shivers from the primordial core of her, the same thing that had told her to run from the oily, lamplit foreboding of those cobbled streets, so many moons ago. Urged her to forgo the traitorous trappings of flesh and searching, fervid spirit; to resist the sable rapture that had divulged from her demure soul, stitch by fragile stitch, the rayless territories of her continent.
But she hadn’t run.
Foolish girl.
Her fluted ears tilt to catch the sound of displaced grass – the purl of soft, soundless nothing as it splits the incipient dusk. Hush. Quietness, so full and complete; so softened by the scent of foxglove and bee balm and… Him. All of him, so when he forms from the strange darkness that snarls and unsnarls around him – from him, beyond and beside him – she swears it too has its own perfume, there against the male redolence of horsehair and old sweat. Adusk and piquant, all-consuming in the way she knows only darkness can be.
She blinks, nostrils widening, pink and aquiver, muscles tight as springs held between apprehensive fingertips; as lightning behind a thin veil of pressure and cloud. Waiting. Expectant. Leaning, as they seem to do in the fading swell of flowers and ebbing sun, to better see the breathy make of each other in his eclipse. You are new, he says, and she nods, watching, with keen interest, the coils of his swart coming to meet the gloaming lavender of her shoulderblade. “Yes,” she concedes – and not for the first time, her newness makes her feel small. “Is it so obvious?”
She swallows hard.
Her breath comes in slow, rhythmic heaves.
That floodlight-gaze. They could be brethren, this moon-branded man and he-of-honeyed-savagery. They could be two of the same matrix; cast in the forge of far beyond this plain, where moonlight goes to die and starlight fails to be. Except her. For, somehow, of moon and stars, she grows vivid and wild root-systems in their darknesses. “Novus,” it has a name. A frail, newborn thing, something she cannot – will not – bring to her breast as eagerly as she had Edana. Not again.
“Who are you? What are you?” reverential and guarded, she bends inwards, towards, away – unable to quite resist the glance of shade across her throat.
☽
