“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
Tonight. He says the word like a prayer spoken to the slumbering god-of-fire in her blood. His lips are twin altars, his ears two cross-tips, his pulse the low thrum of a heart finding salvation. The prayer, his prayer, wakes her up as much as anything does in this mortal cage. Her pulse quickens and each hum of her heart is an ache sinking into the marrow of her bones and pulling her apart.
And she is coming apart-- hair by hair, bone by bone, note by note of that song only she can heart.
Between them slumbers the things gods and lions are made of. There is hunger (there is always hunger). There is blood begging to dissolve in the darkness of their tangling shadows. There is lust smoldering at the dead-wood of their morals. There are a million things, a million of pieces of her reforming beneath the prayer power of his want.
There is an ending, a silence, a tomb hanging across this thing between them that will never (can never) be.
Al'Zahra, the last of her kind, knows that she should lament it's loss. She knows that she should lament a hundred other endings (love, and lust, and motherhood). But she only welcomes them her the gap-jaw of a lion and the wrath of a god. She begs for them, for the end of every cell of this new fragile form of hers.
She begs.
And she begs him.
With a kiss to his throat and a scratch of teeth at the curl of his jaw she answers his prayer. Each of her chains is singing when she stands. Her eyes, her golden molten eyes, are swirling like dragon smoke with the slow-blooded rush of liquor and the hot-rush of need Each tooth is a star in her black mouth when she smiles at him like that wolf on the battlefield.
“Take me home.” She demands. And the way home sits on her tongue tastes just as sweet as every other lie she has given out in this terrible, mortal, wicked place.
Tonight she will make four walls out of his form.
And tomorrow she will forget how salted and sweet the stone of him tasted on her tongue.
@August
