[P] white teeth teens are out;

[Elif]

elif

She was not quite perceptive enough (still too young, burning with hotter things) to notice when the maze-mare’s eyes switched from pleasure to pity. It wasn’t until the heat built and built and the smoke began to billow that Elif’s eagerness passed into unease. It was not until the guide began to choke on soot and her flowers sprout into flame that the pegasus’s eagerness slid into fear. 

By then it was too late anyway, and there was nothing left to do but run, and singe her wing-tips, and swear below her breath until the maze spit her out into the cool evening air. 

-

She still feels like swearing as she stands outside the maze, but her curiosity has her too fully caught to leave the area entirely. For the moment Elif only drifts outside the dark hedges, wondering what strange magic is occurring within those whispering leaves. She had been the only one to choose her path; were the others more successful? Oh, her blood still runs as hot as that burned-up passageway, and her skin still feels the bask of the sun on it despite the deepening evening. 

So when she sees a familiar figure prowling the edges of the maze, separate from the pairs and groups of wandering-folk, it seems only natural to approach. Elif does not quite smile as she approaches Apolonia, but the look in her eye is appreciative when she spots the last of the sunlight glinting off the girl’s hurl-bat. 

When she draws alongside, she tucks her chin toward her chest and glances side-long at her fellow Solterran, the expression in her green eyes marking her as more open and curious than her severely-short mane or tightly folded wings suggest. Elif still looks something of a hawk - but a fledgling one, smelling darkly of soot and magic. 

“No luck for you, either?” she asks, and flicks a wingtip toward the hedge whose shadow they stand in. From somewhere within there is a terrific noise, an explosion or a scream, and Elif raises a brow. “Apolonia, isn’t it?”  

 

“Do not be afraid to bare your teeth -”

@Apolonia hope this works!

[Apolonia]

AMERICA'S FAVORITE, I DO MY BEST AND THEY HATE IT -

The only thing that keeps O from losing her temper completely is the knowledge that she is not the maze’s only failure.

Three others had gone down the path with her, and all three of them, after the maze-god melted into petals and dust, had been left staring bewildered and the glossy wall of leaves and the darkness impending overhead, and all three of them had been forced to flee their dead ends in various iterations of distress. It’s hard to tell what anyone else was thinking as they stalked out of the path in silence, but O has difficulty imagining anyone else’s response is as strong as hers: a rage that builds heat in her chest until it is an infinite fireball, leaching into her brain, her bones, her blood - a frustration so potent she wants to scream, to curse, to grind her teeth until they fall away.

As she shoulders her way from the greenery she thinks about what her mother told her once. You have a temper that redefines temper. At the time it had meant nothing to her, young and angry as she was; young and angry still, but a little more conscious of it, she starts to understand.

By the time O bursts back into the prairie the night is starting to cool, and to darken. A breeze brushes little fingers over her mottled skin. She’s thankful for the way it brings her temperature down so that she’s not quite simmering against the peacefulness of the impending evening, not such a bright light against the dim green of the maze falling away behind her. Like dunking an ember in ice water, the bracing touch turns the fire in her stomach to frost instead, and her head starts to throb a little less.

When Elif draws up alongside her, Apolonia is not surprised so much as she is suspicious. She fights the urge to reach for the blade at her hip - it would be more a warning omen than a real weapon in this case - but the smell of Solterra lingering on the girl’s skin relaxes her a little, and though O regards her watchfully, through dark, slanted lashes, the look in her eyes is mild and curious. It’s O, she says. Her voice is a little brittle, a little cruel. But the bitterness is mostly swallowed by the time she responds again - No, I hit a dead end. You?

@elif

 

[Elif]

elif

Elif catches the cut of that keen gaze on her, the mottled blue and gold of the near eye like a marble or a planet. The other, she is intrigued to find, is as gold as Solterran sand; she does not see the third, or know enough to look for it. The dark-red bay had not always taken the greatest interest in her fellow Solterrans - it had been the hunt with Solis to change that, however anticlimactic the results.

Not, as it were, unlike the maze.

“O,” she responds, though it might have been oh. Either way she smiles, quick as a struck match, utterly unbothered by the sharpness in the other’s voice. Elif has grown up amidst all the desert things, the cacti with their barbs and spines and the canyons with their hot hard walls. She has long since learned not to be offended by the sun-scorched tempers that surround her.

“A dead end is one way to describe it,” she answers dryly, and flicks a soot-dark wing-tip. It wafts the faint scent of smoke between them, a bitter censer. “I wonder if it could really kill you in there, or if it’s an illusion. Did you get a chance to use that?” With a gesture of her muzzle she indicates the weapon, clearly familiar in its place against the girl’s side. Where other, older horses might consider it strange that someone so young might carry something so sharp, Elif thinks nothing of the kind - she is, in fact, a little jealous and a lot curious.


But neither of those things is she quite ready to show, and the pegasus once more shifts her gaze to the commotion around them, marvelous strangers washed in thick evening light. This, too, is like something out of a story, and already she begins to forget the indignity of the maze (her anger, while bright-burning, tends to flicker and gutter like a candle, and is also quick-extinguished). Instead she wonders if the Night Queen is still about, and what other adventures (with more agreeable endings) the night might hold. Elif flicks an ear toward her companion, a little grin tucked in the corner of her mouth. “You planning on hanging around and seeing who wins, O?” 


 

“Do not be afraid to bare your teeth -”

@Apolonia

[Apolonia]

AMERICA'S FAVORITE, I DO MY BEST AND THEY HATE IT -

Elif’s smile is one of very few that does not set O’s skin to an immediate shudder. 

For once she grins back - secret, pointed, wild. Something unexpectedly warm flares and glitters like mica against the swirling colors of her eyes, and she finds herself pleased, randomly, that Elif is not so soft as to take offense to the serrated edge of her voice. Hm, she says in response to the girl’s dead-end quip, and the clipped length of her answer could be show disinterest or merely be a mark of easy satisfaction. With her it’s always hard to tell.

Unfortunately not, O answers to the next question, and her mouth twists down in a kind of disappointment. She unhooks the hurlbat from its leatherbound home at her hip and lets it float in the air between them. In this kind of light, dim and oil-slick, the dark metal seems almost opalescent, like it could be anything, if you looked hard enough; the one thing that will never change, though, is the wicked-sharp end of each blade shining like a lighthouse against the rest of it. She looks at it like someone else might look at a piece of jewelry or a favorite book: reverent, lustful, warm.

And then, after a moment, she lets it fall and slides it back into her pocket, easy, but with no theatrics. The dark red of Elif’s skin looks almost bloody in the waning light; O wonders if she should be comparing it to something less violent, then decides it would be impossible. Depends. The grin returns, fleeting and full of shark-teeth. Are you?

The night swells with the humming sound of crickets, and O watches her with all three eyes.

@elif

 

[Elif]

elif

Elif accepts the grin like a gift - one unexpected, one she is pleased to receive. She recognizes something in it, a mixture of sharpness and joy, and tucks the memory of it away.

It has been a long time since the pegasus girl has had friends; she has all but forgotten what it is like. Not since she was a filly slipping away unwatched to run with other slat-ribbed foals in the hot sandy streets, not since she followed her brother as close and loving as his own shadow.

She tries not to think of the possibility now, lest it slip away like one of the desert’s thousand mirages.

“A shame,” she says to O’s remark, but she is still smiling. It only fades as the paint hefts the weapon from her side with the casual air of familiarity, and that look of wonder-and-want creeps into her expression again. She wonders what it might feel like, to have such a weight at her own hip, and thinks unbidden of the black pegasus (and, too, of the bay). No man would threaten her so-armed, she is sure, and she could have her revenge.

By the time O slides it back into its resting-place Elif’s nose had almost been touching one of the sharp sides; now she draws it back with a shake, half-embarrassed. She is glad to have the topic turn again, though it is difficult to pull her gaze away from the hurlbat and its gleaming.

“No. If it’s a Solterran that wins, we’ll hear about it. If it’s anyone else…” she shrugs in a way that says then who cares? and catches the last of that wolfish grin. For some reason having O’s eyes on her doesn’t make her feel like little more than a filly out of her homeland for the first time. It makes her feel braver instead.

Even when she first catches a glimpse of that third eye she does not falter, only blinks her gaze back to the nearer one. Somehow it only makes the night feel a little more like a fairy-tale, and O a little more like someone she wants to call friend.

“What next, then?” she asks, and her wings shift against her sides before tucking tightly. The scarlet wool at her throat looks like a bloody gash and the last of the adrenaline from the maze has not yet ebbed.

She had seen precious little of the maze, but maybe the night had adventures in store yet.



 

“Do not be afraid to bare your teeth -”

@Apolonia

[Apolonia]

AMERICA'S FAVORITE, I DO MY BEST AND THEY HATE IT -

The weapon in the air hangs between them like a promise. O watches the opal shine in the darkness and fights a smile that twists at the corners of her mouth, puts a sharp little gleam in the strange chimera of her eyes. 

She likes the way Elif looks at the hurlbat - an extension of her body - with reverence, wonder, want. It is a reflection of her own feelings of the thing, and she likes that there is someone else in the world who can love a weapon the way that she does. She is not so blind as not to notice the way Elif leans toward it like she wants to touch the sun. But, stoic as ever, never one to push too hard, O still tucks the weapon away in the next second and does not say a word of how close Elif’s lips came to the edge of it.

If it’s anyone else, who cares? O raises a brow, sort of dubious. She cannot decide if she agrees or not - if Solterra is supposed to be the only place that means something to her, if the want-to-know that she doesn’t bring up is genuine curiosity or a deep-seated petty kind of nosiness. She blows out a tunneled breath and does not notice (or pretends not to) if it brushes any inch of Elif’s skin. 

All three eyes drop to the wool at the girl’s throat. O has to wonder about the vibrancy of it, blood-shine against the dark of her skin. For a moment she thinks she tastes salt in the back of her mouth.

The breeze picks up a little speed, sends the dark of Apolonia’s hair into a soft shiny whirlpool. She blinks against the wind and the darkening Tyrian sky and the soft, bright light of the stars and the sky and her soot-dusted lips break into a clear, radiant grin, and her gaze narrows a little: Anything you want, O offers, easy as a ritual slaughter, and snaps her tail against her back legs like a whip. Have you seen the markets yet?

 She does not feel even a little self-conscious of how it might look to give herself up to Elif so freely. Doing anything else would be dishonest.

@elif

 

[Elif]

elif

It is too easy to picture herself with a weapon, too - who is there to stop her? Elif has, for the most part, still been living like a girl under watchful eye (save for one or two indiscretions), but she realizes now that there is no one to mind what she does.

Anything you want, O says, and it pulls Elif back from her thoughts. She is pleased at the answer, more pleased at the grin, and she lifts her chin skyward, letting the breeze pull fruitlessly at her short mane.

“No,” she answers, “but I’ve heard they’re unlike anywhere else.” This time there is no desert-pride burning haughty in her eyes; she is near enough to a girl yet that the only thing her head fills with is adventure. What wonders they might see, what strangers they might meet - or perhaps she might find a weapon of her own. A whip, she thinks, or perhaps a scimitar-

It takes enough of the sting out of her defeat in the maze to at last turn away from it, and put her back to the high green walls that murmur with leaves each time the wind passes by. Elif takes a last look at the strange horses positioned around the maze, little groups in sashes and silks, with their strange instruments and strangely painted faces.

And then she looks at O, at her three eyes glinting stranger than any of the Benevolent, the weapon at her hip like a thing out of a story. The grin that crosses her lips then is wide and true, and she dips her snip-nosed muzzle and starts to walk. “Have you been to Denocte before?” she asks, the tone conversational only - Elif knows nothing of Bexley or her Night-Court lover, nothing of what it might be to be torn between two cities. She only knows she likes the girl beside her, likes the music that is still rising around them like strange birdsong as they walk.

The field is a wide expanse before them, sweet-smelling summer grasses pale in the moonlight, the firelight of the city just beyond.


 

“Do not be afraid to bare your teeth -”

@Apolonia

[Apolonia]

AMERICA'S FAVORITE, I DO MY BEST AND THEY HATE IT -

Indeed they are like nothing else, the Night Markets simmering with amber and cinnamon, and O is not at all surprised that Elif has never seen them - but also some part of her laments that she, herself, has - that for all her efforts, for her boiling Solterran blood, there is some part of her that can only be sated by Denocte’s darkness and cobblestone.

It leaves a bad taste in her mouth, and she grinds her jaw in an effort to clear it. In the ever-leaving light of the sunset it would be hard to catch unless you watched closely. Overhead the stars glimmer against a newly-oppressive darkness, and it does not make Apolonia feel anything other than confused.

They aren’t, she answers finally. Like anywhere else - and who’s to say if the ringing in her voice is pride or discontent?

Either way she lets the edge slip from her eyes, and by the next beat she is only a girl again, wearing that toothy shark grin. With a casual movement the Solterran sloughs a wave of dark hair from her shoulder and then they are walking again, girl and gun, girl and sword, like a thing out of a story, and for all O’s practicality, even she can see the magic of it. 

The air sings with a brightly sweet smell, clear and soft.

O scoffs at the next question. Yeah, she answers, a little derisively, and bites out a hard smile. 

And that is all.

@elif