Chaos reigns around them even as their lungs flutter like leaves instead of storms in their chests. Two new fighters claim the ring and bellow insults and challenges to each other. The words settle in the crease between her wings like song-kisses instead of words forged down into blunt and useless weapons. A boy taunts the crowd with wine (one she knows is laced) and another carries a betting-book between fools.
Everything, every bit of chaos, leeks into her like oil and begs her to become something monstrous and symbiotic.
And yet, she only smiles at him with her glow brightening like the dawn and swallows down her drink. It burns at her throat, and warms her belly, and still her magic and her hunger beg with the chaos for more, more, more. The song of it shakes the chambers of her heart like bells of war. She eases closer to him, her wings curling above them to shroud of the rest of the chaos from this too quiet place between them.
When he tucks his own wings away she pities him for the new plainness of his form, the way his violence and beauty seems more a blood-less sword than a victory. There is a memory that itches at her of another girl with a collar, one left bloody and beaten at her doorstep. Her father had told her the tale with a promise that nothing but gold, wealth and blood would ever touch the delicate curl of her neck.
Amaunet steps closer and in the secret quiet beneath her wings she reaches her smoky lips towards that collar around his neck. And she wonders if this is the secret to the wrath of broken, tamed things. What would it take to rattle loose his wings until he blacks out the sun, moon and every constellation in the sky?
“I always fight later in the night.” She smiles, teeth and gold dusted lips. Her voice is nothing more than a whisper, a shadow of the star-bright chaos stumbling into madness around them. She wonders if he can hear it all, or if he only can hear the thud, thud, thud of flesh meeting bone beyond their veil. She wonders even as she tucks her lips to his cheek and tells herself that later she'll shake loose all the bits of him held together with steel and iron.
They are made for burning the world, not for burning out.
The whisper of her wings seems more promise than silence when she tucks them back to her sides. Bit by bit the world unfolds itself into their space. “I always wait until the crowd begs for more like a single ravenous snake before I step into the ring.” There is more promise in her gaze as she presses their shoulders together and purrs.
“Will you stay?” And it's not a question. Not really.
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