Tonight there is madness hanging in the air like a fever. She can feel it, a brush a warmth against a feather where there had only been darkness pooling. It runs through her blood in humming notes, each rising to a roar that sounds like fire in a dead wood. The crowd will do more than ponder violence and sip at their liquor tonight.
Amaunet hums at the waiting madness and she lets her lips sing the song to him when she buries them with a laugh into his mane (inspired, of course, by the way he bared his teeth back at her). Her magic begs his wrath, his fury, each of his emotions hanging over a cliff on a threadbare rope, to rise.
She wonders what the insides of him look like, how his violence might start with a snarl and descend with a roar. She wonders how quickly he might bleed. “There is always more.” All the wondering lives in her voice, twisted together with sand and the low lion purr of the crowd pressing in around them.
But not a single on of them dares to bump into her, each keeping half an eye on her like a fish might an alligator.
The room shifts around her even as the fever starts to take it. The fight in the ring is slowly descending into blood-lust instead of sport. Out of the corner of her eye Amaunet watches each of the stallions struggle to survive by the will of their hooves and teeth alone. Her magic races out from her feeding, like the gluttonous thing it is, on their desperation.
Blood flies. Voices quicken into chaos. The crowd presses forward now that the metallic tang of blood is in the air (stronger tonight than the liquor she steals from a passing boy).
She offers the liquor to the golden stallion, turning her teeth from his skin and tucking her wings back into her sides. Later she'll learn to like him better on his knees with blood tangled in his hair like gemstones. Later she'll leave a warning by his windowsill.
Later his name will not matter.
One stallion in the ring dominates the other. She had seen it coming of course (she has never bet on a loser). And there is a lull in the fever madness as the crowd turns back to liquor, and gluttony, and lust. It seems heavier, almost, than the fury weight that had hung to the sounds of violence. In it she turns back to him, her magic still calling to his like a wolf to the moon, and says, “How deep into the belly of the beast would you like to go?”
The shine in her golden eyes already whispers that she's waiting at the bottom of it already. He just has to catch up.
@August
