A lion does not rule the jungle as a king rules a throne. There are no laws writ by the point of his tooth or the tip of his claw. In his eyes there is not a gavel hammer look of justice, or vengeance, or compassion. Upon the lion’s brow there is no crown and on his shoulder there is no blade. He has nothing but his violence, his hunger, his gurgling belly that demands flesh and blood and bones upon which to pick the sinew out.
But even the lion, with his violence and hunger, is a mere sheep in the face of his lioness when the spring comes.
Amaunet is no lioness caught in the jungle boughs with humidity dusting her cheekbones with dew. She is no thing tethered to a pack with something as mortal as hunger to give birth to the violence in the curl of her neck and the snap, snap, snap of her wings as she pushes back the darkness with the rose gold blush of her skin. Amaunet, born out of a pack of wolves and lions, has long been a creature starved even in the middle of war.
And tonight, just before dawn, she is not starvation but the dark and bloody thing in the belly of it.
Each of her feathers feels like paper and her gold feels like chains hooked and waiting around her pretty, hollow throat. The dunes are clouds beneath her feet rolling and parched of rain. The city’s fire embers smoldering at the coldest edges of her white-blue inferno. There is music somewhere in the distance playing a eulogy to all the soft things dissolving in the acid of her wrath. And when she starts to hum it is the sound of marching feet and men with collars around their necks smiling as they lay their spines upon a butcher’s block.
The low moon is a pearl crown shed from the tangles of her forelock. It is not the scythe it should have been when the stallion told her to come. A lioness does not listen to the lion when he tells her which buffalo to gut from heart to live.
Again, it must be remembered, that she is no lioness. She does not gut from heart to liver to feed the starving pride and the gluttonous king. Amaunet does not share.
But still she waits a week late, an arrogant thing that does not bow her head and listen closely to the tip of a horn laid against her pulse point. Somewhere that music is still playing and her lips are still alive with the wasps in the sound of men with collars around their necks heading off to war.
@Martell
