“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
It feels strange to let the music ebb and flow around her instead of between her bones and skin. Here it seems less like a pulse and more like a shadow below a full moon, stretched and longing for a million holes to be chewed out of it. She lets it wash black and heavy over her, through her, around her and out again. And perhaps her heart is only singing a mockery of this song as it roars and trembles in her chest to the same brass deep howl of the thunder outside.
Lighting flashes outside and the crowd flashes stark and almost otherworldly. Tonight perhaps they all are, just bits of mortals tangled together in some chaotic design of life.
Zahra watches them all and drowns down the sight of it drop by drop as she sips at her liquor. It is the first time that this has felt so far from her own world that she longs for the memories drifting just out of sight in the remnants of her immortal soul.
She notices the girl the moment she walks into the building. There is gold, rain-water and something so soft it makes Al'Zahra's teeth ache to see it, dripping from her. Innocence, she thinks. It has been eons since she's seen it (and eons since she twisted and mangled it into something bloated with avarice and gluttony). Her smile has too many teeth in it as she watches the girl walk to her corner. Wolfish, perhaps, or monstrous (or maybe just hungry).
“And you seem light as air.” Desert, and sun, and gold cling to the notes of her voice. It promises a song, and a glorious fall down, down, down from wherever it is the golden girl is flying. And in her gaze there is the weight of eons, and embers, and magic as she traces each hollow between the girl's rib-cage. “Better sit before you float away.” Some of the teeth fade in her smile as it turns to fox-cunning gentleness.
A glass scrapes like a blade across the table as she pushes it to the golden girl. And the echo of it seems to say, in a language older than them both, let us not go gently into the belly of the beast.
And her next sip, with tooth and claw and wrath, goes down smooth as blood.
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