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.
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One moment. Just one - that’s all I have before the spell breaks, and I am no longer the only thing in the world, one singular moving part in the system of some much broader organism. I am dancing, and I am right, and then there is the boy.
No, there isn’t the boy. There’s a bit less than the boy, in fact; there is the dark shadow of him on the sand, but not the boy himself. I see the image of his wings impressed on the ground below, overlapping with the lines that the sandwyrms are drawing ever-so-carefully in the sand, and it fills me with a quiet annoyance, but I don’t dare look up. If I ignore him, he might still go away, and that would be in everyone’s best interest, his most of all.
(People have caught me out dancing, a time or two. Dancing, or running with jackals, or hiding beneath the wings of teryrs. Most of the time, it ends with someone’s blood stained on the sand, one mass of entrails or another. I’m never actually grateful for the intervention, and they never think to ask.)
I hear him spiral down, regardless, and repress a sigh. He’s interrupting the wind, like that, and it’s all I can do not to lose the rhythm of my dance, even as he settles into spiraling nearly close enough to touch, so close that his hooves nearly stroke the surface of the sand. How are you not afraid? I raise my chin and look up at him through the dark shadow of my veil. A twitch of ice-blue eyes in a statue face, barely interested and entirely unmoved. He is the color of charcoal, like my mother’s face, with hair that is just as white – grey-eyed and dappled, with bright red designs painted beneath his eyes, on his forelegs, on the hook-curve of his wings. There isn’t much about him that interests me, barring those red marks. My gaze fixates momentarily on the sun rising into place on his wing, and then, fickle as a gust of wind, it dances away, and I focus on the dunes again.
For a long moment, I’m perfectly silent. Even my song has gone still as a corpse in my mouth, dried up on my tongue.
I don’t think I would have answered him, if it weren’t for the fact that he starts dancing, too. I’m not sure that he knows it any more than a bird does, when they decide to fly with the current instead of fighting against it, but he’s dancing regardless; each falcon-flap of his wings beats in perfect rhythm with my quick strides over the sand, the undulation of the beasts below. It’s not enough, not really - not enough to understand a thing. Else, he wouldn’t be asking that kind of question, and he wouldn’t have that kind of look on his face.
It’s more than usual, though, and I tell myself that’s probably enough. I toss my head back, blue eyes rolling white in their sockets. “Nobody would be scared,” I say, finally, “of something you know won’t hurt you.”
There is a disturbance in the sand right at my side, a bit like a ripple on the surface of the oasis, like something rising. I notice it, but not enough to spare it anything more than a passing glance – less still to flinch away from it, even though I know what will surely follow. There is the faintest indentation of diamond-shaped scales just beneath the surface, like an imprint in metal, and then there are the scales entire, wrapped taut around a torso that is all-muscle and as broad as an old tree. For a moment, the arch of one serpentine spine creeps from the sand, shedding rose-gold flakes like a second skin; and I move in ever so close, just close enough for the undulating side of the great wyrm to brush my flank before it disappears beneath the sand again. Feather-light; almost gentle, like a first kiss with a lover. I sigh out, through my teeth, and I let my eyes fall shut, and I try not to think too much about the interrupting boy or the way that pretty sunrises make me feel a little bit too soft for comfort.
I’m still dancing, even blind – even with nothing to guide the quick pace of my hooves over the dunes but the low rhythm of the sandwyrms below and the press of wind against my ears, which is, in itself, enough to know just how to move.
@Aeneas || <3 || "girl dances like a sufi in a lit field as someone off-camera blows bubbles," jeremy radin
Speech
☼
One moment. Just one - that’s all I have before the spell breaks, and I am no longer the only thing in the world, one singular moving part in the system of some much broader organism. I am dancing, and I am right, and then there is the boy.
No, there isn’t the boy. There’s a bit less than the boy, in fact; there is the dark shadow of him on the sand, but not the boy himself. I see the image of his wings impressed on the ground below, overlapping with the lines that the sandwyrms are drawing ever-so-carefully in the sand, and it fills me with a quiet annoyance, but I don’t dare look up. If I ignore him, he might still go away, and that would be in everyone’s best interest, his most of all.
(People have caught me out dancing, a time or two. Dancing, or running with jackals, or hiding beneath the wings of teryrs. Most of the time, it ends with someone’s blood stained on the sand, one mass of entrails or another. I’m never actually grateful for the intervention, and they never think to ask.)
I hear him spiral down, regardless, and repress a sigh. He’s interrupting the wind, like that, and it’s all I can do not to lose the rhythm of my dance, even as he settles into spiraling nearly close enough to touch, so close that his hooves nearly stroke the surface of the sand. How are you not afraid? I raise my chin and look up at him through the dark shadow of my veil. A twitch of ice-blue eyes in a statue face, barely interested and entirely unmoved. He is the color of charcoal, like my mother’s face, with hair that is just as white – grey-eyed and dappled, with bright red designs painted beneath his eyes, on his forelegs, on the hook-curve of his wings. There isn’t much about him that interests me, barring those red marks. My gaze fixates momentarily on the sun rising into place on his wing, and then, fickle as a gust of wind, it dances away, and I focus on the dunes again.
For a long moment, I’m perfectly silent. Even my song has gone still as a corpse in my mouth, dried up on my tongue.
I don’t think I would have answered him, if it weren’t for the fact that he starts dancing, too. I’m not sure that he knows it any more than a bird does, when they decide to fly with the current instead of fighting against it, but he’s dancing regardless; each falcon-flap of his wings beats in perfect rhythm with my quick strides over the sand, the undulation of the beasts below. It’s not enough, not really - not enough to understand a thing. Else, he wouldn’t be asking that kind of question, and he wouldn’t have that kind of look on his face.
It’s more than usual, though, and I tell myself that’s probably enough. I toss my head back, blue eyes rolling white in their sockets. “Nobody would be scared,” I say, finally, “of something you know won’t hurt you.”
There is a disturbance in the sand right at my side, a bit like a ripple on the surface of the oasis, like something rising. I notice it, but not enough to spare it anything more than a passing glance – less still to flinch away from it, even though I know what will surely follow. There is the faintest indentation of diamond-shaped scales just beneath the surface, like an imprint in metal, and then there are the scales entire, wrapped taut around a torso that is all-muscle and as broad as an old tree. For a moment, the arch of one serpentine spine creeps from the sand, shedding rose-gold flakes like a second skin; and I move in ever so close, just close enough for the undulating side of the great wyrm to brush my flank before it disappears beneath the sand again. Feather-light; almost gentle, like a first kiss with a lover. I sigh out, through my teeth, and I let my eyes fall shut, and I try not to think too much about the interrupting boy or the way that pretty sunrises make me feel a little bit too soft for comfort.
I’m still dancing, even blind – even with nothing to guide the quick pace of my hooves over the dunes but the low rhythm of the sandwyrms below and the press of wind against my ears, which is, in itself, enough to know just how to move.
@
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
