THE MOON ROLLING IN HER / MOUTH, BURNING AWAY THE BLACKNESS. / COCOA EYES HALF-CLOSED. LIPS / PARTED. A SONG BUILDS IT BODY / WITHIN HER, A PSALM / NOT EVEN THE SNOW CAN SAY.
☼
When I dance, I dance in the way that most people wish that they could fly – that is to say, as a weightless gesture.
It is early morning, and the sun hangs on the edge of the dunes like one half of a fat peach. For most of the day, the sand in Solterra is colored like burnished gold, but, on a morning like this - one with a pretty sunrise -, it gets just a little bit pinkish and almost-soft, even though it shouldn’t, because there’s nothing much soft about the Mors, or anything in it. Mornings like this almost trick me into feeling a bit soft, too, and that’s probably most of the reason why I go out looking for sandwyrms the moment that the sun is over the horizon, stepping over my brother’s sleeping form where he laid at my side and carefully sidestepping my mother’s bent tangle of blade-silver, muscular limbs so I don’t wake either of them.
(Ereshkigal cracks open one big, red-yellow eye to watch me go, and she makes sure I know it, but she doesn’t say a word to make me stop.)
I slip on my silks and go running across the sands.
Mother says that they hunt sandwyrms sometimes, in the court. Sandwyrms and teryrs. They’re both symbols of Solis, she says, and warriors like to prove their skill by hunting them down – it was how Maxence became sovereign, she says. (That teryr threw her into a rock and nearly split her skull open, but she doesn’t much like talking about it.) Sometimes they’re easy to find, especially if you don’t want to be found by them, but sometimes the hunters have to track them for weeks just to find the one. I don’t have an easy time believing all her stories, sometimes, and I’ll tell her that; and then she’ll shake her head, and she’ll remind me that not everyone has luck like me, much, she’ll say, as she’s sure they’d like to.
(I’m not sure that everyone would like to be confined to the desert – but I don’t say it, most of the time.)
I don’t know how long it takes me to find the sandwyrms, only that Mother hasn’t sent Eresh after me by then, and she wakes early every morning of her life. I only know that I see that tell-tale movement in the sand – like a rattlesnake, but below the surface, skidding out grains upon grains like waves lapping at the beach. Almost immediately, I feel my lips curl up in the self-satisfied sickle of a toothy grin, and I spring between them like a jackrabbit. It’s hard to say how many there are, when they’re swimming (because sandwyrms swim – at least I think so, even though Mother clucks her tongue at the technicalities, and Ambrose quietly disagrees, but I know what it means to be a sandwyrm better than either of them), but I know that there are a few. The wind has just gotten started over the dunes for the morning, the sing of it a little like the beating of a thousand little insect wings (a swarm of locusts, maybe), and it’s probably hot, but not hot like the desert can be. If I had to compare it to something, I’d say it feels the same way honey tastes.
I plant my hooves amidst all the sandwyrms, and I watch them draw patterns on the surface of the sand. I’m not sure what starts me dancing – I think it might be the way that I know they’re dancing below, even though my mother and my brother wouldn’t agree to that, either, but all of the sudden, I can’t stand still for the life of me. One hoof, and then another, and a twirl of hair and silk; and I’m sidestepping the beautiful labyrinth of the tracks they leave on the sand, skipping over their heads like I’m dancing on a grave, outstretching my wings to welcome the dawn with each arch of my neck and curve of my spine. None of it is formal, and none of it is learned – but I’ve mimicked the wind down to a work of art, and sometimes it seems to move with me, not the other way around. I don’t notice it, really, but I start humming a tune to match, and, even though I’m sure that I haven’t, because the only songs I’ve ever heard are the stories that my mother sings to Ambrose and I at night, it feels familiar as the blood in my veins, running right on through.
(Sometimes, when I get like this, I start wondering how much of my body – or my self - is my own.)
And then – then there is a brief, precious moment where I feel more whole than that half-peach sun in the sky, where there is only me, and my song, and the desert wind, and all the sandwyrms beneath my hooves, and the sand beneath me, one singular moment where I almost feel like as much of a girl as I know that I’m supposed to be.
@Aeneas || !!! || "girl dances like a sufi in a lit field as someone off-camera blows bubbles," jeremy radin
Speech
☼
When I dance, I dance in the way that most people wish that they could fly – that is to say, as a weightless gesture.
It is early morning, and the sun hangs on the edge of the dunes like one half of a fat peach. For most of the day, the sand in Solterra is colored like burnished gold, but, on a morning like this - one with a pretty sunrise -, it gets just a little bit pinkish and almost-soft, even though it shouldn’t, because there’s nothing much soft about the Mors, or anything in it. Mornings like this almost trick me into feeling a bit soft, too, and that’s probably most of the reason why I go out looking for sandwyrms the moment that the sun is over the horizon, stepping over my brother’s sleeping form where he laid at my side and carefully sidestepping my mother’s bent tangle of blade-silver, muscular limbs so I don’t wake either of them.
(Ereshkigal cracks open one big, red-yellow eye to watch me go, and she makes sure I know it, but she doesn’t say a word to make me stop.)
I slip on my silks and go running across the sands.
Mother says that they hunt sandwyrms sometimes, in the court. Sandwyrms and teryrs. They’re both symbols of Solis, she says, and warriors like to prove their skill by hunting them down – it was how Maxence became sovereign, she says. (That teryr threw her into a rock and nearly split her skull open, but she doesn’t much like talking about it.) Sometimes they’re easy to find, especially if you don’t want to be found by them, but sometimes the hunters have to track them for weeks just to find the one. I don’t have an easy time believing all her stories, sometimes, and I’ll tell her that; and then she’ll shake her head, and she’ll remind me that not everyone has luck like me, much, she’ll say, as she’s sure they’d like to.
(I’m not sure that everyone would like to be confined to the desert – but I don’t say it, most of the time.)
I don’t know how long it takes me to find the sandwyrms, only that Mother hasn’t sent Eresh after me by then, and she wakes early every morning of her life. I only know that I see that tell-tale movement in the sand – like a rattlesnake, but below the surface, skidding out grains upon grains like waves lapping at the beach. Almost immediately, I feel my lips curl up in the self-satisfied sickle of a toothy grin, and I spring between them like a jackrabbit. It’s hard to say how many there are, when they’re swimming (because sandwyrms swim – at least I think so, even though Mother clucks her tongue at the technicalities, and Ambrose quietly disagrees, but I know what it means to be a sandwyrm better than either of them), but I know that there are a few. The wind has just gotten started over the dunes for the morning, the sing of it a little like the beating of a thousand little insect wings (a swarm of locusts, maybe), and it’s probably hot, but not hot like the desert can be. If I had to compare it to something, I’d say it feels the same way honey tastes.
I plant my hooves amidst all the sandwyrms, and I watch them draw patterns on the surface of the sand. I’m not sure what starts me dancing – I think it might be the way that I know they’re dancing below, even though my mother and my brother wouldn’t agree to that, either, but all of the sudden, I can’t stand still for the life of me. One hoof, and then another, and a twirl of hair and silk; and I’m sidestepping the beautiful labyrinth of the tracks they leave on the sand, skipping over their heads like I’m dancing on a grave, outstretching my wings to welcome the dawn with each arch of my neck and curve of my spine. None of it is formal, and none of it is learned – but I’ve mimicked the wind down to a work of art, and sometimes it seems to move with me, not the other way around. I don’t notice it, really, but I start humming a tune to match, and, even though I’m sure that I haven’t, because the only songs I’ve ever heard are the stories that my mother sings to Ambrose and I at night, it feels familiar as the blood in my veins, running right on through.
(Sometimes, when I get like this, I start wondering how much of my body – or my self - is my own.)
And then – then there is a brief, precious moment where I feel more whole than that half-peach sun in the sky, where there is only me, and my song, and the desert wind, and all the sandwyrms beneath my hooves, and the sand beneath me, one singular moment where I almost feel like as much of a girl as I know that I’m supposed to be.
@
Speech
WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS REVOLT AGAINST ITwhat you love is your fate.☼please tag Diana! contact is encouraged, short of violence
