“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
Tonight the stars are celebrating. They are pressing against her in their mortal cages and tracing the lines of her chains with their glowing, feral gazes. Al'Zahra can see judgment in their gazes. She can see the way it taints the awe as she welcomes the meteor storm beside them. And she can see something hotter than judgment, darker than awe, in some of them as the music grows slower, deeper, more. The moonlit bass runs over them and the drum echos in her own ears louder than a heartbeat as she twines her way to the center of their ritual.
She does not know the meaning behind their music and their poetic chants that seem more manic than rhyme. But the music has not wavered and the bodies moving around her make her feel like there is some cliff-edge she's racing for. She is determined to get there first because she still remembers when the first star was chewed out of the sky. She remembers when they first started to fall.
Perhaps more are falling tonight and this is only a sacrifice to their new mortal forms.
Her skin feels like fire and her blood like embers. She feels caught in the cage of their glowing eyes and their fervor. And when someone presses something to her lips, hard as the core of an apple, she does not pause to wonder before swallowing it down like wine. The moonlight seems like a biting thing when she steps back into her dance, all sharp silver seeking the sleeping magic of her ancient soul.
She wonders if they know, as the music slows even more, that the dancer moving through them is older than their mother (the great sky horse who chewed holes out of her skin and spit them like seeds to the ground). She wonders if they know how much she wishes to leech the arcane from their blood. There is magic to be had in the blood of a star, magic enough to turn back time.
And when she lays her teeth at the rib-cage of a horse pressing in too close to her form, she wonders how much of it she'll need to take.
@Morrighan
(set in night court, during a shed-star ritual)
