[P] until I am lit bright as the moon,

[Amaunet]

like having your throat cut,
just that fast

 Tonight, in the sickle moonlight, Amaunet is not riding the wake of war. Her hunger is not for blood, or violence, or the dull many-lion roar of a wanting crowd. Tonight her need is deeper, slower, thick blood instead of thin and racing. Tonight she is oil instead of gasoline, moonlight instead of fire, mortal skin instead of molten gold. 

She is wanting, that never changes, but she is need too tonight. 

It gathers beneath her skin like a thundercloud in the places where the desert meets the tide and the belly of a dune the sun-warm peak of it. Blushes of dawn-gold gather between the dark creases of her ribs and her feathers. But her own glow, her own shining hunger that is too great to hold just in the cage of her body, is nothing more than another spot of wealth moving through the crowd and the oasis ferns rising up to tease the edges of her hips. She does not mind, not terribly, that she is almost softer, almost gentle in the chaos around her. 

Amaunet imagines it makes her like a wolf in the snake den, or a lion slumbering in that ever present herd of sheep. Someone laughs and it is too loud for the oil-slow purr in her blood and the muted whisper of her feathers against the night-flowers in the garden. She turns away. It is not what she has come looking for. 

She does not want brazen boldness or a body bloated and slow with liquor. Amaunet wants---

Oh, she wants the hunt and the feel of teeth at her throat begging her for the one thing she will never give willingly. Her eyes land on the almost-hunter, the man who has already promised that his knees will bleed and her skin will hum. Jasmine clings to her braids and her tail as she unfolds herself from the garden as she moves towards Corradh and his table of paints. 

Amaunet moves towards the hunt, the kill, the promise of teeth and gold and prayer. 

And maybe, oh maybe--

She wants learn what it is to be conquered. 

Her wings unfurl and her teeth flash in a smile that is both hunger, and need, and full of as many promises as it is teeth. “If I let you touch me,” there is more purr than language in her voice, more want than air, “what would you make my body into with your paints?” And when she touches him it is with lips free of paint, and blood, and cruelty. 



@Corradh

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[Corradh]

Corradh cannot keep his eyes from her. The way she slices like a knife through flesh as she walks through the crowd. He sees her—or thinks he sees her—in a series of many flashes before she arrives to his station. It takes too long, he thinks—as he is not a man often kept waiting. But Corradh enjoys it; the tease of it; the game of cat and mouse that is ended, abruptly, when she flashes her teeth in a smile that belongs to something wild, something untamed. If I let you touch me she asks, and those words themselves are enough to unravel him.

Corradh cannot help it—he has seen her body many times and never touched it. There’s has been the dance of planets; the primordial and distant rotation of gravity, cosmic, even fate. 

They had collided, briefly, once before. The memory even now fills him with the same ecstatic, electric excitement he feels before a fight. But it spreads—it intoxicates. He had, in all but name, sworn himself to her before—

IAnd now? It seems his fidelity is rewarded tonight when she brushes her lips—more softly than he could have imagined—against his skin. 

He is spiralling and he knows it. Corradh nearly welcomes it—he always has. The descent. The fall. In so many ways, it is the most delectable part of living. He leans back. Then, the black stallion smiles a smile that burns like embers do. “Tonight?” he asks, with measured eyes. Corradh makes a low sound in the back of his throat—thoughtful, purr-like. It is a matter of restraint not to reach out and touch her. “A leopardess.” Corradh reaches out with a brush, clean of paint. The bristles are dry when he runs it down the line of her jugular vein. 

Take it as she may. 

"Speech." || @Amaunet

we are born like this, into these carefully made wars

where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes

CREDITS|| Avis

[Amaunet]

like having your throat cut,
just that fast

 Somewhere there is poetry in song performed by the same stallion who had sung when she lured the king into the desert. It echoes faintly in her ears beyond the feral crush of the drunken, and the lustful, and the lost. Whatever it sounds like, whatever the words are, it is not her poetry the stallion is singing of.

And somewhere there are drinks, and curses, and magic made out of plants to weaken the heart. She can taste it in the air, the stench of sweat made ripe with it and the iron of blood when the liquor turns mortals into monsters full of violence. But that too, is not her violence turning the air into something that is bitter, sweet, and intoxicating.

Then there is this, the look in his eyes as her turns to her and the way the world stutters and echoes the beat of his wild heart that she can almost see in the pulse just below his cheek. Amaunet smiles as she presses closer (and her smile is more a purr than a look). This, this weight and promise between them, is hers in a way that nothing else in the party is.

“Perhaps there is only tonight and no others.” She says and the way she lays her gaze to his is more than a perhaps. It is a claiming, a consuming, a golden echo of the way her heart is racing like a war in her chest. The scratch of bristle, naked and free of paint, makes her shiver and her glow flicker like a star.

Tonight she does not try to hide the waiting or sketch ownership by way of tooth and lip across his neck. She does nothing more than look at him as a girl might look at a boy, or a monster at a wolf, or a leopardess at her leopard. Her jugular arches into the touch of brush. She wonders if he feels a stutter in her pulse or if he can only her the purr of her want and nothing else.

At her side her wings do not settle as they should. Rather they flutter in and out in a mimicry of both flight and of fight. Beneath her skin magic starts to purr as she does, hunger for the promise in his touch and the challenge in his eyes. “Paint me then, Corradh, I want to know what it feels like to be a predator.” She whispers the words against his cheek as she trails her feathers across his rib-cage.

And the glimmer in her eyes, molten and golden as the desert, says I know as she looks at each of his spots like there are stars instead of markings.



@Corradh

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