The chaos sparks like a bit of deadwood anointed with an ember behind her. It starts with the lament of one stallion and the ire of another. It grows as a wildfire does. Spark- to wood- to flame- to apocalypse. She can hear their bellows like thunder in her heart and it swirls like a storm in the edges of her golden gaze when she flickers her gaze (flame quick) between the coming fight and Locae.
Somehow, despite the feral brutality behind her, the beauty of her violence is becomes art against a gilded frame. And she does not try to hide the bright glory of it. Chaos and violence have been bred into her soul as it is bred into all children of war and suffering.
She smiles at him, above the lakes of liquor refracting her own brightness back at her, and steps closer. It’s always closer with her, like the world is a deer torn asunder and she is nothing more than a wolf in the middle of winter. Even the flare of her nostrils is more predator-like than horse-like when she lifts her head like a gauntlet in the space between them.
Already she has counted the number of his ribs, his blinks, the pulse flickering firefly rapid at his throat. She has drawn maps to the end of the world in the patterns of his scars. And she has imagined, twice as much as that, the ways in which he might be convinced to fall apart at the press of her teeth at the apex of his jugular.
“Will it not be glorious to watch them discover it?” Her words twist between the bright violence of her smile and the bleating whispers of wings (that have not learned how to settle) against skin. The hair down her spine lifts like there is a lighting storm churning above them. She breathes in the whiskey on his breath and the bated darkness of the soul sleeping like a snake below that. And when she turns to stand side by side with him, wing to rib, her heart stutters in her chest to learn the melody of it.
Because she needs to know the song of it in order to tear it apart, note by note and chamber by chamber.
With her natural magic she grabs the lone surviving drink from the bar. Amaunet does not flinch as she swallows it and licks the lingering drops of liquor from her lips. “My money is on the bartender.” And when that same bartender lifts his eyes to her, with a spark of hate ember bright in them, Amaunet smiles back.
Like tinder to flame she waits for the burn.
And it’s the same burn she’s waiting for, when she lays her cheek against his as if they are lovers instead of rivals.
@Locae
