She glows. Her heavy strands of black hair slide /
Like serpents over somber, blood-red plush.
☼
The darkness of the catacomb spat her out as a hearth might an ember. She stumbled free blindly, the shock of the sunlight causing her to stumble, to squint, and to bare her teeth at the dazzling midday star. Between her heaving breaths, each one drinking in a lungful of fresh air, she samples the hostility of her surroundings. The air is dry, as though every ounce of moisture has been wrung like a rag and dispensed some place far grander than here.
Her cracked lips parted as she adjusted to the glare, a foreleg lifted defensively and the solid point of a whetted horn brandished towards the blinding sky. No sooner had she broken free from the sands did she fall to her knees, bowing before the deserts of her home; perhaps to Solis himself.
But no God grabs her withers betwixt a thumb and forefinger; no ray of sunshine lifts her from her bed of sediment to stand strong, to strand proud, once more.
She is alone. Her flame does not sing, her heart does not quake with the weight of camaraderie. There is only the solitary sound of her blood as it pumps through her ears, a gushing accompaniment to the sparse howl of wind. The grit was warm against her flesh, and she sank against it willingly, acquiescing to the starved weariness of her languid body.
In some ways, the waking woman felt boneless, unable to gather her feet beneath her and move forward.
In other ways, she was drawn like a bow, the thin arch of her nape made to coil, to strike.
She opted to try neither option, enjoying, instead, the quaint misery of letting the sun burn her imprint into the coarse bed upon which she lay. It was no time at all before the sheen of sweat came to lay over her dapples, her body quivering with life.
If she could burn, then she could breathe—if she could breathe, she was alive.
Hello?
As a waking beast, the woman was gathering her limbs quickly—but then, more ungainly newborn than she was a basilisk of the deeps. The sand seemed to slip beneath her hooves as she lurched gracelessly to all fours, the milky white of her eyes drinking in the blinding glare that haloed this stranger.
His voice was rich; and it was, undoubtedly, a strange interlude to the roughness of such a place. The concern was unmistakable, though not enough to unwind the tension that bunched in her muscles. The vision of him unfurled in chestnut and flaxen, and the blood-red of his gilt cloak, kissing the sand beneath it in a low cast shadow.
The man stood a head taller than she, and yet her chin lifted without deference, heedless of the squall of her own life. The knowingness that she’d emerged from cobwebs and skeletons lay only with her, and the pride within her moony eyes—eyes that stared back at her, some feet away—could not be stamped out by the desert.
(Feinted, of course; the fear would come later, when the wretched befuddlement of her circumstances sank upon the horizon like the sun, leaving her encloaked in darkness and memories once more.
For now, though—for now, she could stand proud.)
Do you require any help?
Her tongue was leaden behind a cage of teeth, and her breast swelled with uncertainty, her heart fluttering, as she gazed upon him. But she was not doe-eyed; she was not prey.
“And what,” she breathed, strengthening her voice. “What would make you think I require any help?” There was something lilting, almost musical, to her words—not even entombment could wipe the guarded apprehension from her brow.
The desert was a land of survival—and weakness was a trait only of the dead.
(But she came from a forest, too; where things could be soft, could be cool; where water kissed her skin in crystalline drops…
Or had that just been the dream?)
The dizziness of her blinking, of her shaking head, betrayed the truth that lay within the shadow of her words. So, too, did the teetering of her steps as she inched forward, swaying.
But in her sluggish adjustment to the daylight came another realization, one that fixed her eyes on him like daggers.
“Who are you? Where do you come from?”
Had he risen from the sand, as she had?
