' Hardly has the universe stretched its wings to span '
The pathways of his body are gold and black, glitz and darkness, and when he lifts his eyes back to the trees and the moss all the world is made of him. Everything around him carries bits of him as if the whole forest bends to the wind of his feathers when he lifts them up and rustles them through the air just to hear how they sing. Each leaf on the ferns around him looks up and turns to glass until the earth around him is black and flecked with wealth.
It's better this way, he thinks, better that the world be made of gold and violence, instead of leaves that can burn and rot. He will never rot. This is knows as well as he knows wine and hate and blood.
And when he watches the other stallion come closer a little of the gold melts and turns back to a river of blood. Veer wonders at the shadows that hang between the stallion's antlers like oil. He wonders more at the way he can cast them both in more oil and shadows as he lifts his wings into the dapple sunlight.
The still sing like silk in a hot, summer breeze.
He can feel the stallion's breath. It whispers like ichor and rot between the strands of his mane. Of course it does not sing as his whole body does. Nor does it pause on an inhale like the forest around him. But it does burn a little and it does rise something that feels a little like violence, blood and gold to press like an itch under his skin.
“There is nothing in the world that would cost me dearly.” He watches each of his words and each of his breaths pour from between his teeth like fire-coated blades. Everything about him rises in a chorus, as if the world is paying and paying just to hold the shape of Veer inside of it. Something in the way he says no more on costs suggests that he will just take and take and take until the world is dead in fire.
“But for you, I think..” Veer pauses and lowers his feathers from the sunlight so that the world might be bright again. And in that pause he smiles and the look is as cruel as it is hot, hot, hot. “there are some things that are very dear.”
Veer knows the world is made of him and he knows the lack of violence and fury when he sees it.
