like having your throat cut,
just that fast
just that fast
Her life has been full of a hundred moments like this. They have haunted her hours since the first time she walked from her mother’s teat and tossed herself into the games of children. She can see twenty different stallions in his look, twenty different nights that roused her hunger instead of satisfied it, twenty different looks that promised disappointment over and over again. Amaunet knows him well, well enough to know that there is not enough charm in a tame thing, a false thing, a safe thing, to hold her.
Had she not been holding on to his nose ring she might have torn the smirk from his face instead.
Instead she pulls, because there is no other way but violence to translate all the things boiling and festering in her magic. And when she lets go it is to snap her wings in the second warning. The dust billows around them like mist. Every eye in the door opens. Amaunet can feel the weight of them all tracing the lines of her back like a caress of every chaotic monster waiting in the castle for her.
For her.Not, she thinks, for them.
This time her feathers do not settle back at her side and her restlessness rouses at the idea of a promise unfulfilled. Maybe if he had laid teeth to her throat, or blade to her pulse, she might have not snarled at him like a fighter instead of a mare. At her back her tail lashes at her hocks like a lash, and even that sting of pain does not soothe her.
Amaunet has stopped wondering if it’s her magic gone wild, or the island, or whatever might live in the stallion who talks of love. She has stopped thinking of the other hundred moments like this one in her life. But she is remembering the secret in his statement, a memory faded and unimportant the moment he had left.
“Our queen.” She laughs but there is more cruelty in the sound than humor. “You say that as if it is my desert that you hail from. If you had been a tribe member you did not stay. If you had I can promise that your heart would already be outside your chest.” One of her wings slides down his spine as she moves away from the door to circle him (daring a kick, a snarl, anything but another promise he cannot fill).
Her wing moves from spine, to hip, to ear before she replaces feather with lip. “But if I was your queen should you not bow?” She whispers as if she’s unconcerned with the answer.
But her magic is. Her magic is very, very concerned.
@Malik
Had she not been holding on to his nose ring she might have torn the smirk from his face instead.
Instead she pulls, because there is no other way but violence to translate all the things boiling and festering in her magic. And when she lets go it is to snap her wings in the second warning. The dust billows around them like mist. Every eye in the door opens. Amaunet can feel the weight of them all tracing the lines of her back like a caress of every chaotic monster waiting in the castle for her.
For her.Not, she thinks, for them.
This time her feathers do not settle back at her side and her restlessness rouses at the idea of a promise unfulfilled. Maybe if he had laid teeth to her throat, or blade to her pulse, she might have not snarled at him like a fighter instead of a mare. At her back her tail lashes at her hocks like a lash, and even that sting of pain does not soothe her.
Amaunet has stopped wondering if it’s her magic gone wild, or the island, or whatever might live in the stallion who talks of love. She has stopped thinking of the other hundred moments like this one in her life. But she is remembering the secret in his statement, a memory faded and unimportant the moment he had left.
“Our queen.” She laughs but there is more cruelty in the sound than humor. “You say that as if it is my desert that you hail from. If you had been a tribe member you did not stay. If you had I can promise that your heart would already be outside your chest.” One of her wings slides down his spine as she moves away from the door to circle him (daring a kick, a snarl, anything but another promise he cannot fill).
Her wing moves from spine, to hip, to ear before she replaces feather with lip. “But if I was your queen should you not bow?” She whispers as if she’s unconcerned with the answer.
But her magic is. Her magic is very, very concerned.
@Malik
