For her there has always been a certain thrill in turning a stone to dust, or water to wine. Perhaps it's in the way the hardest and the plainest things beg to be recreated. Or maybe it's the thrill in reading the whisper their bodies, their coldness, do not how to give voice and life too.
Or maybe it's the only holy inclination in her form, the urge to recreate and worship the reborn.
She laughs when he answers as a stone might. A single word heavy as a stone dropping from a table. And she wonders what it would take for him to shatter like glass or ferment and flavor like wine. Would it take a war, a cut, or a caress? Maybe it would take all three, at once (and she smiles deep in her monstrous heart at the thought). She leans against him, like a weight at the corner of a crooked table, and tests the hardness of this stone she's claimed for the night.
Each feather of her wing rustles between them, a hundred flight touches and kisses, as she gives him more and more of her weight. “Are you asking why I fight later in the night or why I want you to stay?” Her smile is full of bright teeth that shine like stars in a lantern hanging nearby. They wait there, as she watches him, like each bone is waiting for the whisper of a wish from him. And she could grant them all, even the one he's too war-hard to think of asking.
A scream echoes around them from the cage. In her chest both her heart and her magic leap like lions at a hare, hanging onto the furious and broken sound like a blood-trail. Golden glow settles across her cheeks like a blush and makes her look almost-holy, almost-soft, almost-other. “Or would you like me to guess what question it is you don't know how to form into words to give to me?” The look in her eyes, the midnight desert tone of her voice, it all promises that in the end, after the blood and the liquor, he will beg her to take more than questions from him.
Perhaps he'll beg her to take that noose of metal from his neck. He could learn to love the fire, she thinks, like a free-thing instead of a duty-chained-thing.
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