He comes with desert heat peeling off his skin. The air os Terrastella is damp and full of salt as the breeze blow in off the sea. Aquilline, Cairo follows the currents of hot air. They push him up, up to where the sun blazes hot and consuming. It heats along the Arete’s spine. It wards off the icy bite of winter that prowls with tooth and claw ready to sink deep through clothes and skin and press upon bone a chilling kiss.
Cairo spots the evergreen woods of Terrastella. He tips his wings and descends, gilded and fierce, out of the skies. He lands upon the cliff and the waters rage beneath him, furious a desert man has slipped its wet, drowning grasp. The crown of sharp feathers atop his poll ripple in the wind. They cut the air as if their vanes were not soft but made of sharpened metal.
Cairo prowls from where he lands. His feathered tail hisses as it runs over the blades of meadow grasses. The spires of his ears are elegant yet they crumble as pyramids to his skull. His sharp, eagle eyes snag upon a girl who deeters close toward the cliffedge. Pearls and jewels adorn her. They press into her soft skin, they tangle like tears from her neck. She weeps and the sea air kisses the bejeweled tears from her fragile cheeks.
She is slim and fragile in the way that all Terrastellans are. She is delicate like their flowers, as fine at their piped glass. She is fae in the way Cairo is half monster. He is abrasive sand and intense passion that burns as hot as the scolding sun. The collar about her slender throat gleams and calls the aquilline stallion in.
Cairo comes to her, caustic and wild. He sets his avian gaze upon her and the sea calls up to him, demanding a prize, a taste of her jewels or a chance to drown the sand that clings to his skin. He ripples heat and the cool of winter upon her skin slips, feline against him. “Step too close,” he begins, his voice low and rough like rust, “and it is a long fall to a wet and icy death.”
He drinks in the soft of her, the wet of her thick lashes that press upon the arch of her cheekbone. She is new and strange and lovely. She is nothing like the desert.
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