—
Aster’s world is not a one of open battlefields, of fields pitted with holes to shatter legs and trumpets ordering a charge like a rooster calling for morning. Her knowledge is not that of weapons made of tempered steel and how to cut a city’s knees from under it.
But oh, death - that is something she knows. She has watched Teak pull down antelope with a strangling kiss and begin to feed before their eyes are dull; she has watched hawks prey on hares and wolves on hinds. She has reached out to dying things with her magic and helped their heartbeats slow and slow…
She does not think she would be afraid of war.
Of course there is no war on her mind, not tonight, not with a phantom before her silver as the mist and real as the smell of smoke and salt and blood. Aster adds two crimson, curving lines of paint beneath the winking moon; they might be waves, they might be wings.
Her smile is as small and wicked as a silver pin when Avesta’s words crash against her ear like frothing tide. And she laughs when the unicorn takes the brush from her, and her teeth flash when she does it.
“Then it’s a good thing I like the smell,” she says, and curves her chin up and up, baring her throat for touch, or paint. She wonders if there is claiming in war - if a warrior looked at another and thought yes, you will be mine, my sword will know your flesh. Her eyes, golden and bright as the fires just being lit in the field beyond the forest, do not stray from Avesta’s, as dark as the heart of the sea. (She would say those are only her own, too, Aster thinks).
Aster has never been claimed before, never been caught - only in games with her cheetah. She wonders what it is like.
@Avesta
But oh, death - that is something she knows. She has watched Teak pull down antelope with a strangling kiss and begin to feed before their eyes are dull; she has watched hawks prey on hares and wolves on hinds. She has reached out to dying things with her magic and helped their heartbeats slow and slow…
She does not think she would be afraid of war.
Of course there is no war on her mind, not tonight, not with a phantom before her silver as the mist and real as the smell of smoke and salt and blood. Aster adds two crimson, curving lines of paint beneath the winking moon; they might be waves, they might be wings.
Her smile is as small and wicked as a silver pin when Avesta’s words crash against her ear like frothing tide. And she laughs when the unicorn takes the brush from her, and her teeth flash when she does it.
“Then it’s a good thing I like the smell,” she says, and curves her chin up and up, baring her throat for touch, or paint. She wonders if there is claiming in war - if a warrior looked at another and thought yes, you will be mine, my sword will know your flesh. Her eyes, golden and bright as the fires just being lit in the field beyond the forest, do not stray from Avesta’s, as dark as the heart of the sea. (She would say those are only her own, too, Aster thinks).
Aster has never been claimed before, never been caught - only in games with her cheetah. She wonders what it is like.
@Avesta
