“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
The night moving around them, bloated with mortals and cedar-smoke and gems twinkling in the corner of her gaze like stars, starts to feel like a nest of ants. Al'Zahra who-is-the-last-of-her-kind, feels like she might be a grain of sand trapped in between the synchronized army and the walls. She wants to be the flood and the fire, the beginning in the end. Love is not enough for her (nothing is, nothing will ever be).
Surely, she thinks, there must be more to life than this?
Her hooves dance over the stone as she prances in place, singing even now with the elegant lines of her forms. Air races though her lungs like a gathering of vultures and the darkness starts to feel like a tide dragging her out to sea even as it drowns her. Music lives in her pulse, a steady drum of war no mortal remembers. She wants to sink into it like a stone-- this feeling of running, and running, and running until there is only the smell of smoke clinging to her hair and nothing else.
She does not want forever and happiness. Only the embers of it.
And oh, oh, she had thought Morrighan the same.
She smiles as Morrighan offers a name. There are no other suggestions in her thoughts, only the itch of restlessness (like embers in the dirt of a dry forest) and the low-hum of a forgotten war. Her teeth feel like weapons instead of bone beneath her lips as she presses them into the Warden's shoulder. She wonders if she can go through, or out, or just dissolve at the edges of them. “I like it.” Al'Zahra lies, she does not feel anything but hunger, and need, something that feels savage and coiled with waiting.
“No.” She does not yell the word but it feels sharp as a sword on her lips. And when she pulls away the space where the night rushes back in between them feels soothing instead of wanting. “I will not stay. Not even for you.” The phantom chains dissolve away from her ankles and her lungs take their first real breath since her dance ended.
She still remembers walls pressing in against her smoke day after day and century after century. It is not a thing she will suffer. Never again.
A part of her heart, the one that is straining and mortal, aches when she only deepens the black space between them. It sobs in her chest like a dying sparrow. “But I will come back.” Her eyes flash like two golden stars in the darkness as she tries, and tries, and tries, to feel anything but the need to run until the horizon swallows her hoof-prints.
“For you I'll come back. For both of you.” Her hooves sound like tears falling from the cheeks of a god as she dances to the side like a wild thing fighting against a noose around her neck. They sound golden.
@Morrighan
