“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
Tonight she is on the edge, hanging and suspended between wildness and the ferocity of a wildcat freshly cage. The feeling causes her blood to race and spark like lightning. It's begging for the magic it used to know and devour as intimately as flesh. Inside this form her soul rages against the mortal cage of it, of the hardness of bone and stone.
Outside she is as calm as ever and the muted roar of the crowd is nothing more than pillows upon which her violence lounges as lazily as a cat bloated with a hunt. It paces in her gaze and the others slipping away into vice surely see it when their eyes linger on her but their hooves always turn themselves away from the lion resting, and waiting, and watching.
Hours and empty glasses pass like this. Dealers change, fights beak out and settle down like lambs, and still she does not waiver in her stillness in her banked violence. Outside the moon brightens and the stars gathering themselves up into stories and religion. It all slips by her, unnoticed.
And of course, it would be him, the golden boy with his blood begging to be devoured, that finally presses in through the shroud of violence hanging off her.
He shatters it.
She would tear the world apart for another taste of it, of another night in which there is only sin, and avarice, and not this bit of steel clanging against her teeth. Perhaps she does, when she raises her own glass to his as if there is only fire and dancing between them instead of bodies dew-wet with greed and broken hope. She forgets about everything that tastes like metal instead of liquor, and smells like salt instead of smoke.
The intensity of her gaze does not waiver from his. Not even when she bows her head in a gesture that says, in a way older than the stone beneath their hooves, come.
@August
