“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
Al'Zahra does not turn away as he does. She does not watch the merchant pour golden poison into a glass. Her gaze settles, on all his banked fire, on the curl of his neck, the way he speaks like smoke and looks like a young war. There is something in him, she thinks, that is still chained and tethered in the belly of the earth. Morrighan had the same look, a rose promising to turn into a thorn bush.
She loves the way he wears it. And she loves the way that she can press her lips to his ear and imagine she's digging a hole in the earth. “I will have to discover them all then.” The way she presses her shoulder to his, the way she leans against him, makes it seems impossible that she said I instead of we. It makes it seem like she's debating stealing all the endings from the center of his heart where they might be hiding.
He raises his glass, and the smile she lets cross her face as she holds her own, is a wicked svelte look. There are a hundred promises in the way she flashes her teeth like only lions and wolves do. It's a look bred for midsummer night gardens where pagans lay entangled on sheets of gold. Her soul is too old to be innocent and her young form is too ravenous to be delicate. “To finding the first ending.” She says with barely a pause between the arch of her smile and the end of her sooty voice.
The drink is gone in one swallow.
The liquor burns like molten gold. Her stomach, her blood, her lust revels in the sensations. And if he doesn't revel in the sensation too, she decides that she will make him the moment he talks about stealing from her. The girl part of her trembles. The lion roars. The god looks at him and sees only flesh and bone instead of beauty. All the parts of her stare at him.. wondering.
She smiles and presses their lips together, breathing deep of the smoke the drink has left on his lips. There she says, “yes,” between the smoke and skin like he asked her instead of demanded. But in her eyes, when she pulls back and starts to tremble like she's already dissolving into dance, promises that there is only one of them who will be stealing tonight.
Only one.
@August
