“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
She is dancing across the pathway of moonstones, and amethysts, and dragon dust.
Each of her hooves is an instrument of wonder singing in peels of metal and stone. Her body is singing like a blade on a battlefield. All her chains are a harpsichord that sounds like victory against her rib-bones and her hocks. In the song she is alive, a bit of horse, a bit of magic, a bit of wonder encased in something that beats with blood.
There is a story in each tangle of hair curling like a snake across the underside of throat. She looks like a world of magic caged, and beaten, and longing to be free. She looks like light in the darkness, slick with sweat, wild with all the forest and spice caught in her tail.
Al'Zahra looks like a song that the world did not know to sing.
But it knows now in each eye trailing her like fire trails a pillar of smoke. It knows in the way the fires welcome her home like a sister. She inhales the smoke and spice. She exhales beauty, and softness, and a little bit of wickedness. There is a summer-storm on her lips that's salted with electricity and anointed in rain. History lives in the vibration of her lips tilting upwards with a secret only she knows.
She is the oldest thing in the market and yet her skin is tender with youth. Her eyes are heavy with magic and yet her bones are dead with it. There are a hundred tangles of all the things that do not make sense twirling like seeds on the wind between this cage of flesh that traps her now.
Flesh is better than gold. Flesh can dance and gold never dies.
The door appears like magic, as if it has been summoned by wonder of the way each inch of her sings, and sings, and sings. A scarab is crawling across the dead oak like it's feasting on magic instead of death. But of course she knows there is no magic in sin (and no real magic in this mortal wreckage). She opens the door anyway with a tap of card, and there is no magic in the warmth that rises like a cage to meet the winter kissing itself down her spine.
Even inside her steps are a dance across the wood and carpet. Her song is muted now and her chains are heavy without the snow and the wind brushing viciously through them.Al'Zahra lays down on a bed of pillows in a room full of horses that know nothing about magic (real magic) and each gold link of her chains press into her like small, hungry blades.
She smiles and even in that she is still dancing.
