“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
The air starts to feel charged against her skin. There is a storm about to break against the reckless, wanting shores of them. It has been so long, too long, since she remembered how it felt to made of only smoke, fire and magic. This feels like unfolding, like changing between forms so fast that it makes her feels dizzy. This feels like becoming.
Once she destroyed men bolder than him with their own desires, their own wishes. Even trapped, she had been a wolf in waiting, a lion in the tall-grass, a monster determined to take her freedom in drops of blood until the world drowned for her.
But it's his heartbeat that echoes in her chest when he traces a line down the outside of her ear. It's a lover's touch, bold enough that she should turn to him and take back all the desire raging in her by force. For a year she has been a mortal dancer, instead of a jinn, and no one has been brave enough to touch her like this. Not even when she welcomed it. Maybe they saw the wolf in her gaze, the danger in her form, the promise of consumption instead of wanting.
Maybe he is only the first fool she's tried to sweep away. Or maybe she's the fool for trembling at his touch, for taking his heartbeat into her own chest, for wanting to dissolve into him instead of into dance.
She shakes her head so that her chains sing a siren song against her skin. They touch her in all the places she's thinking about his teeth and his heart. The song and the crowd pressing in around them grows wild. There are drums beating low, and everything about the sound reminds her of how it felt to be the possibility of everything. “I could lead forever.”She winks and it has nothing to do with humor and everything with boldness. And when she pulls at his mane, with teeth more than lip, it's with a promise in her eyes that for tonight she might let him be anything, be everything, or be nothing more than the heartbeat humming like a wildfire beneath her chest.
Someone else scrapes a touch along her rib-cage as she drags him into the crowd like a lioness dragging home her kill. But that touch does not make all her edges want to dissolve. And it's dissolving that she does, when she curls her neck like a swan around his neck and starts to burn.
Al'Zahra does not race for the ending. She savors the story and smoke of it.
@August
