“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
There is a certain thrill in the feel of the hungry river tearing at her knees. It feels like hanging off the edge of a cliff or hanging between the wings of a sparrow and the gap-jaw of a cobra. She feels both dangerous and in-danger as she steps fully into the current. It bellows around her in white-froth and rocks kicked harshly against the fragile bones of her legs. Each note of that fresh-water roar cracks open another wound in her broken, ancient heart.
The wounds scream at the look in her daughter's eyes that shape themselves into chains. Her lungs flutter in her chest like she's drowning and golden lamp walls are rising up around her. She wonders if she'll ever breathe in the taste of freedom again.
Her heart shatters.
Another cage blooms in the wreckage of it and the river promises, as all violent things promise, to wipe it all away until the bars are rust in the bottom of the sea. Al'Zahra hums with the current and her chains make a brassy undercurrent to the fever in the notes of her wordless song. She takes another step into the current, pausing only once to look at the girl standing at the shoreline like a mortal thing waiting to die.
She know they'll all die in the end. But she will not (will not!) go as this dancer trapped in a world full of gods and bated magic. She'll go in the jaws of a lion, a wolf, with a sword to her heart. She'll go and worlds will rattle and dissolve in the wake of her death.
A court guard passes close to them, wondering perhaps at the mare wading too deep in the rabid river. It's to him that her feverish eyes turn, all lion rage and molten gold. She bares her teeth like she's more warrior than dancer, more Morrighan than anything else. “Take her home to Denocte.” And perhaps the soldier agrees because the look in her eyes, these weak mortal eyes, holds more holiness and sick hunger than a mortal mare's eyes should hold.
And this, this passing off her her daughter to anyone (anything) but herself is the kindest thing she can do.
Perhaps it is the kindest thing she has ever done.
But then, suddenly, there is no more kindness to be found. She does not wait for the solider to lead her daughter away (she does not wait for the heartbreak the girl will suffer to soften to anything but abandonment). Al'Zahra does not wait to see what the mortal world, the weak world, will make of her before she starts to run with the current.
The thrill of the current, the froth, the rock slipping out from under her hooves and dragging her into the current, is enough to fill each and every crack in her wild heart. She runs, and runs, and runs, until the current reaches the sea.
And even then, even when the horizon looks like a bound thing in her gaze, she does not stop running.
@Maeve
