from the mind of Chaos’s lonely daughter
and the sun fell heavy and thick
to warm the blood of a world"
The night presses in against them, a dark and sentient thing that nips at their heels and whispers against their mortal souls. Amaunet can feel it in a itch down her spine like a touch of teeth and stain. It begs her onward, deeper into the liquor and smoke haze. Her feathers drift across the girl's rib-cage as she tucks them back into her own sides (lest she surrenders to the black itch and dissolves into the smoke and clouds with nothing more than a caress of silk to remember her by).
“You are a literal thing, girl-from-the-bottom-of-the-sea. Where is your poetry?” Laughter twists between her words like vines and roots around stone. Her teeth flash more than they should as she turns them into a bit of light cutting sharply through the darkness. And perhaps it's a look of hunger caught somewhere between her skin, darkness and her laughter that still drifts above them like jasmine and cedar smoke.
Ahead the boys stumble against a vendor. The wheels of his cart moan and tremble as the largest of them vainly tries to keep his balance and his cleverness before his friends. Amaunet's violence rises like a tide as the itch still racing down her spine flutters softly against it. She purrs where the other girl sighs.
She does not try to hold it in, not when the drums start to beat and pulse like monstrous hearts by the bonfires.
Another coin lifts from between the folds of her cloak. It spins and dances in the air between them as she flips it as deftly as any shark in the belly of the Night Court. The gold reflects in her eyes, dimmer but sharper than the golden-glare of her eyes. “This coin is not from your Novus, but it was forged from the same treasures as the rest of them.” She bares both her teeth in throat in an ancient challenge that perhaps only their bones truly understand. “You'll have to look deeper than that to find my secrets.” In the silence she snaps a wing, loud enough that the boys finally turn to notice the lion following in their wake.
“Careful though, the black bottom of my ocean does not have a single drop of water.” And she does not look towards the boys who are stepping towards them with drunk boldness in their gazes. She does not look at anything but the flutter of the girl's lashes as she tucks the coin back into her silk and purrs.
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