“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
An end-of-summer storm is rolling in and the docks are spiraling into a frenzy. For each roar of distant thunder there is an echo of hammer against wood and hooves racing against stone. Lighting spiderwebs over the scene, making bits of it starker than the rest. She can see a boy racing to lower a sail, his eyes white-rimmed and wild in the flash of brightness. There is a captain bellowing orders and his teeth flash bright as razor-blades in the lightning.
And then there is the way her golden chains turn silver in the corner of her vision-- silver as new-forged iron.
It's almost easy to miss the pull of them and the ache of them as the wind presses them hard-as-nail into her sides. The wind is holding on to most of her attention, the howl of it, the way it's racing to crown her head with fury nature born instead of god-born.
This is how it felt to be made free-- standing over the sea with nothing but a bit of wood holding back the black bottom from filling up her lungs. She wonders if it would feel the same to plummet into the belly of the storm, to let it reshape her into dust and memories like a well-worn leaf. One hoof lifts to hang over the edge and her anklet recreates the wind into a whispering howl of gold, bone and sea-salted skin.
She thinks about leaping.
But behind her a captain blow a horn like a call-to-war. Instead of leaping she turns to watch the crowd scurry to follow his orders like lambs before their Shepard. Something half-slumbering in her veins snarls at the sight even as something else purrs, and starts to hum.
Al'Zhara listens to the humming part as she turns from the storm and the sea just starting to lap at the edges of the dock like it's shore instead of anchor. And inside the seaside establishment a drum starts to beat, low and steady as a heart, urging the crowd to set anchor by their vices instead of bones.
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