“We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light,
and deep in our secret hearts we worried that we were an accident,”
In another form Warset might have rejoiced at being understood, or perhaps she would have pressed her lips to his and whispered instead of kissed. Is that what I am?, she might have asked. Or maybe she would have only snapped out her wings like a bird of prey and painted the words, I am not shed. I am torn out like scars instead of this mortal, fragile language.
But now, with the thing in her bones snarling mine, and kill, kill, kill there is no space for language in the small spaces between hunger, and want, and running.
Already she has forgotten the golden boy with her silver eyes that made her wish for comets and stardust. There is only the sand pillowing her paws as she runs. And there is only the darkness brushing cool as saltwater against her hide. Her tail lifts behind her, almost playful in the chase now that her thoughts are full of only violence and confidence. Almost she is lost to the pure joy of streaking through the alley, in the knowing that she's the only one of her kind that has hunted through these hollow, limestone walls. Almost--
She does not stop to think about the wrongness of the want or the way that somewhere in the soul she's praying for music, and sisterhood, and the sweetness of moon-water on her tongue. She does not stop to think about anything at all when she lunges for the stallion's nose as he tries to leap around a broken cart. All her veins are singing as she soars through the darkness like the tiger-eyed stallion is nothing more than another mountain rising out from the dream-water begging for her to land.
There is not thought for the after or the longing, or the way her soul is lamenting the loss of his skin against her lips.
But there is a moment, with her claw bared and her lips peeled back in a feral roar, that she wonders if she's still shed like a old, rotten flower in a garden. The wondering goes on, even as her weight catches the stallion in mid-flight and sends him tumbling to the ground.
And so, unlike a real beast, she turns her head to August and waits before laying her teeth against fallen stallion's jugular.
@August
