“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
Each mile free of walls, and stone, and that mortal army of ants, lightens her step. It feels like home, this wildness, stretching out around them. The mountains rise like spires behind them and the forest and the grasses each whisper in the wind stories that only she remembers. Her steps are light-as-air as she races across the knee high grass.
Here, with freedom as endless as the horizon, Al'Zahra remembers what it is to be air, and ember, and magic.
The child (her child, she has to remember that), races long-legged with an awkwardness that hopefully eases with time. And even when she slows her running to spare Maeve's lungs, there is something immortal in holy in the elegance of her movements. The links in her chains ring like bells over the twilight meadows adding a certain otherness to the roar of the river as they approach.
Music reaches towards them with the wind, and the last feral restlessness in her blood settles like a full-bellied lion. Her muscles coil snakelike and her knees crack and start to remember all the ways in which to dance like a storm instead of a girl. She smiles and the muted light flashes off her teeth, turning them to small stars caught in this mortal flesh of hers.
Al'Zahra starts to dance, and hum, and the night hums with her.
“Fireflies.” She smiles at Maeve as the child races back to her side from wherever it was she had wondered. The way she says fireflies makes it sound like fire flies instead. And they do, landing on their noses and pooling in the creases of their spines like snow. “You do not catch them.” Her hooves whisper on the stone shore as she dances away from the foal and her neck curls almost coquettishly as she dissolves into the darkness speckled with the fallen stars.
The river roars in her ears like a thousand wildcats and the strum of a guitar plucks at her soul like it's nothing more than silver and frayed satin. “They must be wooed.” Al'Zahra dances, forgetting for a moment everything but the thrill of sinew, and darkness, and song.
And on her tongue, beneath her secret smile, the taste of freedom blossoms like an ancient flower.
@Maeve
