It takes her no time at all to feel the leopard slip to the surface of her chest. She can feel her snarl, and spit, and ravage her claws against meat and muscle. And she can see, in the kindness of his gaze, the marrow of her curse smiling a mockery of home at her.
Her bloody lines of paint stretch out between them like wounds in the battle-field of the comets and the constellations. The snap of her wings, as she spreads them wide as a war-call, is nothing more than another wound stretching out between them in the air. It stretches on in the violence of her gaze until they are not two chewed-out things but a pure-thing and a mutt-thing. And between them, in the wounded air and the wounded earth, there is only a song of war.
The glare of the sun is forgotten with the metronome sway of the ruby moon at her still healing throat. She wonders if he is star enough to catch the warning in the diamond and bloody stones.
“I am no star sister of yours.” Her voice waivers between star, leopard, and mortal girl. There is a memory of fragility in it and an echo of all that hate she discovered in the belly of the god mountain. A part of her heart breaks anew to hear the cruelty on her own lips.
And a part of her rejoices at the sound.
Warset does not think she’ll forget walking by a vial of her own blood in the tent of a shed-star. She does not think she’ll forgive either. Both thoughts are in her gaze as she steps to toe the line of war she’s carved out between them. She tries to swallow them down, just enough to bare her teeth and find a song in her belly. Nothing comes.
Her wings settle at her sides just as suddenly as they were snapped wide open. “There was nowhere else to go.” Dejection, and a small trace of the agony she still feels, hangs just as noose-like as her curse on her tongue. But it is a small mercy, the smallest of them, that she remembers to swallow her name back down when it clamors at the edges of her teeth like a song.
That song, that single note, belongs to her and her alone. It is all she has left.
@Azrael
