Has it been a year since I have been civilized and dawned upon my brow the crown of a princess instead one befitting a wolf? Has it been a year since I danced to music and pressed my silver-dusted shoulder into horse-flesh instead of predator fur?
Has it been longer than that? Less? Do I care?
Music is different here. It's deeper than the war-songs, slower, sunshine instead of blood-red. There is nothing of the soot and cedar poetry that I remember from Denocte. This is nothing like my mother's stories with meanings that I rarely care to unravel or grow cautious by. This is my father's music.
But maybe, when the crowd ebbs and flows together in violence and sin, it belongs more to me than anyone else in the room. The notes of it run through my skin like fire and the gold and glitz reflect across my skin like I am glass instead of flesh, and bone, and blood. If I was not a wolf I would be blushing, or smiling, or batting my too-thick lashes like I know a secret no one else does. And despite the elegance of my collar I am a girl of flesh, and bone, and blood and all my pearls are black as the bottom of the sea.
Foras keeps close to my side with is feral gaze swinging back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. His eyes are too wild and too hungry tonight. I can see his jaw when he smiles as wolves do and the bones of his hock when I turn to look at him. The music reminds me that I should caution him, cool the itch in his skin telling him that this is not where he belongs.
There are always a million others things I should do but the ones that I choose to do.
My wolf and I turn into the crowd and and we do not dance even as we walk arrow straight though the press of dancing bodies. And here is another thing I should not do, but I do it anyway---
I whisper, wake up, wake up, wake up, and the instruments of the band start to flutter around the musicians like leaves in a storm. The musicians looked horrified when their song continues without the touch of their mortal skill.
It's then that I start to dance, laughing in a way that sounds more like a snarling wolf than a princess.
The music belonged to me anyway.
@Martell
