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 his hooves touch down on the sand, I prepare myself - unflinchingly - for a sudden emergence of jaws. Sharp teeth the size and shape of backwards-curved daggers. I prepare myself for entrails drawn across the sand, for those sun-painted feathers on his wings to be strung across the dune like a falcon butchered mid-flight. My eyes are closed. I hear his steps on the sand with nothing more than a backwards twitch of my two-tone ears, and I never spare a glance at him over my shoulder.
I think that I can tell, at first, that he is trying. It is because of the sound of his hooves on the sand - the way that they are almost-stumbling, a mimic that cannot quite keep up. My lashes flutter, and my eyes spring open, and I continue my dance without any indication, but for the twitch of my ears, that I have noticed him at all. (If I strayed close to him, kept pace with him, perhaps I would be deterrent enough against the wyrms if they happened to notice him. But - if he wants to put himself in their mouth, impress himself right between their jaws, that is his prerogative and his foolish courage, not my own. And - if Mother is to be believed, hard lessons are the ones that stick the most, like desert bramble caught in your coat.) His rhythm disturbs me like a wind blown the wrong way, ruffling my coat where it should smooth it down, until it doesn’t.
I think, for a moment, that he is dancing properly, the only way that he should. The only way that I know how. (To put me in a crowded ballroom and ask me to dance would be akin to caging a tiger and asking her to do the same. You’d make a fool of yourself and the cat.) It is only then that my lips slip open again, and I begin to sing in my mother tongue, caught halfway between Solterran and the cadence of the wind on the dunes. What matters isn’t what they mean - it’s how they sound. Mother only sings stories. I try, sometimes, to mimic her, and I’ve gotten good at it - songbird, she calls me, warbird, songbird, habibi -, but what I always want to sing is less of the story and more of something beneath it. Not the story; not the queens and the heroes and the kings and the villains, but the landscape, the dunes drenched red with blood or gold as newly-spun silk. The story is always-
The sun is rising.
My hooves skid to a stop at the crest of a dune, sending up an arcing spray of sand, and there is a moment where I am perfectly still, save for the way that the wind disturbs my trailing hair and silken veils. I watch the trailing shape of the sandwyrms trace their way through the desert like the stroke of fingerbones, rising and falling over dune after dune until they finally disappear into the sun. It is only then that my head turns, slowly, to face the boy. He is older than me, surely. (He doesn’t feel it, but nothing ever does. It is that part of me, I think, that something-else where girlhood should be, that makes me feel so - strange whenever someone speaks to me. I think that the sun god must surely have plucked some part of me from the desert. There was some part of me that existed before me, the part that will never quite be mine.)
I feel the sunlight on my back, soft burning gold of a halo wrapped around the curve of my neck. I would always rather be facing it than I would have my back to it, as though it will take me back if I dare to look away for too long, but now I watch the boy with all the carnivorous patience of a lurking sandwyrm. (That is to say, none at all.) I have not spent much time with other children, save for my brother, and, much as Ambrose would rather think otherwise, he is just as strange as I am. I never know what to say to them.
That is one thing I have inherited from my mother instead of the desert wind - I never know what to say, or how to find the right words to say it.
“So, little falcon,” I say, my gaze flicking the length of his - markedly smaller - frame languidly, like the sharp and hungry-eyed stare of some great, lounging cat, “who is it that you claim to be?”
I could ask his name.
(That is probably the last thing that I’m interested in.)
@Aeneas || I have no explanation for this but that she is a Weird Little Girl. || "girl dances like a sufi in a lit field as someone off-camera blows bubbles," jeremy radin
Speech
☼
When his hooves touch down on the sand, I prepare myself - unflinchingly - for a sudden emergence of jaws. Sharp teeth the size and shape of backwards-curved daggers. I prepare myself for entrails drawn across the sand, for those sun-painted feathers on his wings to be strung across the dune like a falcon butchered mid-flight. My eyes are closed. I hear his steps on the sand with nothing more than a backwards twitch of my two-tone ears, and I never spare a glance at him over my shoulder.
I think that I can tell, at first, that he is trying. It is because of the sound of his hooves on the sand - the way that they are almost-stumbling, a mimic that cannot quite keep up. My lashes flutter, and my eyes spring open, and I continue my dance without any indication, but for the twitch of my ears, that I have noticed him at all. (If I strayed close to him, kept pace with him, perhaps I would be deterrent enough against the wyrms if they happened to notice him. But - if he wants to put himself in their mouth, impress himself right between their jaws, that is his prerogative and his foolish courage, not my own. And - if Mother is to be believed, hard lessons are the ones that stick the most, like desert bramble caught in your coat.) His rhythm disturbs me like a wind blown the wrong way, ruffling my coat where it should smooth it down, until it doesn’t.
I think, for a moment, that he is dancing properly, the only way that he should. The only way that I know how. (To put me in a crowded ballroom and ask me to dance would be akin to caging a tiger and asking her to do the same. You’d make a fool of yourself and the cat.) It is only then that my lips slip open again, and I begin to sing in my mother tongue, caught halfway between Solterran and the cadence of the wind on the dunes. What matters isn’t what they mean - it’s how they sound. Mother only sings stories. I try, sometimes, to mimic her, and I’ve gotten good at it - songbird, she calls me, warbird, songbird, habibi -, but what I always want to sing is less of the story and more of something beneath it. Not the story; not the queens and the heroes and the kings and the villains, but the landscape, the dunes drenched red with blood or gold as newly-spun silk. The story is always-
The sun is rising.
My hooves skid to a stop at the crest of a dune, sending up an arcing spray of sand, and there is a moment where I am perfectly still, save for the way that the wind disturbs my trailing hair and silken veils. I watch the trailing shape of the sandwyrms trace their way through the desert like the stroke of fingerbones, rising and falling over dune after dune until they finally disappear into the sun. It is only then that my head turns, slowly, to face the boy. He is older than me, surely. (He doesn’t feel it, but nothing ever does. It is that part of me, I think, that something-else where girlhood should be, that makes me feel so - strange whenever someone speaks to me. I think that the sun god must surely have plucked some part of me from the desert. There was some part of me that existed before me, the part that will never quite be mine.)
I feel the sunlight on my back, soft burning gold of a halo wrapped around the curve of my neck. I would always rather be facing it than I would have my back to it, as though it will take me back if I dare to look away for too long, but now I watch the boy with all the carnivorous patience of a lurking sandwyrm. (That is to say, none at all.) I have not spent much time with other children, save for my brother, and, much as Ambrose would rather think otherwise, he is just as strange as I am. I never know what to say to them.
That is one thing I have inherited from my mother instead of the desert wind - I never know what to say, or how to find the right words to say it.
“So, little falcon,” I say, my gaze flicking the length of his - markedly smaller - frame languidly, like the sharp and hungry-eyed stare of some great, lounging cat, “who is it that you claim to be?”
I could ask his name.
(That is probably the last thing that I’m interested in.)
@
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
