“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
Rend and ruin someone had called her once, when her eyes leaked soot instead of tears and her life ran is river of magma instead of blood. She can see it now, as the girl joins her like a lamb to the wolf-den, in a bit of language the golden mare does now know she's speaking. Al'Zahra reads it like a song: a note of fragility in the way she chokes and sputters at the virgin taste of liquor, a ballad of almost-mortality in her laugh when it rises cloud-thin above them.
She wonders if the mare knows all the ways in which she speaks.
Al'Zahra misses the mystery in the places with only storm-clouds and no song.
When she smiles, and laughs as low as an ember, she begins to teach the golden mare the secrets of the shadows, of the song without words, of the pull of soot and smoke down their throat in the wake of the liquor. “Would you have drifted into the storm or away from it, little dove?” The question comes belatedly. She had been too caught in the soundless song to string together the pattern of words instead of bone notes and curling shivers of flesh.
With another swallow, one that looks far more graceful in her form, she leans forward until her chains whisper against the half-rotten wood. “The question should not be what brought me out on a rainy day.” The look on her face turns both feral, and wanting, and something more immortal than the gods in a lost stallion's religion. It is both the look of a siren, and a lion, and a girl who burns brighter than a solar flare.
It is a look that destroys both worlds and hearts.
One of those is already burning parts of this world to ash.
“You should ask instead what brought me in.” That look does not fade in the echo of her desert-in-the-twilight voice. It only flashes a warning when a stallion passes too close to their table before stumbling onward to easier marks than a dancer with a wildfire in her eyes. Or maybe he only caught that air of 'other' on her skin like a stag catching wolves on a downwind.
Al'Zahra takes another sip, encouraging the girl with a look that says, try harder little dove, you will need to be more clever than that to keep up. Beyond their nook of things unsaid, the musicians sip their drinks until more and more wildness leaks into the sound of their poetry.
And it is still not enough for her, not nearly enough.
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