“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
It feels like the moon is dead, that is always always been dead. Each time she looks up towards the candle-light pretending to be stars against a sky of wood, she can only see all the things that are not there. Magic, of course. But there is also only low music over a silence as thick as the sea. There is no laughter here, no life, only secrets and shadows that are black and stretched thin with more secrets.
She shivers, and it has nothing to do with the silk spooling out from her like red and purple ripples in a lake of wealth. Her shiver has everything to do with the gold twining about her between the shadows, and the smoke still clinging to her like dust. It has everything to do with laying still when she wants to rise like a billow of magic to dance among the not-stars in the not-sky above her head.
But this place is not made for girls who dance like the willow trees, or like feathers caught on a fast current.
This place is made for unicorns, like the one sitting across from her, with the devil in their smile. She does not remember the moment in which he joined her. She had been too distracted by that shiver in her skin telling her she was caught, caught, caught on a stage that could not dream of holding her. But when she tilts her head towards him there is a demon in her golden gaze to meet the devil is his.
Al'Zahra thinks of the sand, how it looked being made into dunes, and storms, and other things that pretended to be solid enough that the sea could not sweep them away.
Her smile turns into a moon and her skin stops quivering over sinew. “Have you come to tell me what mysteries these walls might hold?” She knows he doesn't work here, he smells too much like the sand that haunts her in every dream and in every pearl of dust shining in a ray of light. She still feels like a willow tree when she lets a little wickedness leak into the curl of her neck as she watches him (like a branch whipping in a storm, hungry for flesh).
“If only for a night.” Her nose reaches forward towards him, a greeting of the willow tree to the mountain of sand that could never hold roots in all the depth of it.
@Anatoly
