“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
From the other side of the hill she can hear the music of the winter twisting with the winds of almost twilight. It's been years since she has heard the sound of stone, and ice, and frost. It sounds lovelier here, with the open air stretching out for miles and miles around her. Everything sounds better when she swallows freedom with each inhale of these dying, mortal lungs. It's the ending that makes it sweeter, the reapers nipping at her blood each time she takes a step and each time she plunges off a cliff with no heed for the consequences.
There's a headiness in the recklessness and she's addicted to the hedonism of this life.
Ahead there is a pillar of smoke that instantly makes her thing of Morrighan with her fearful heart of far. And when she inhales the freedom-tainted air, there is the scent of wolf that sends something in this prey body of her humming and trilling like a sparrow in a garden. She quivers with that strange urge to run into a wildfire just to see what hungry lions might be starving in the smoke. She's alive with it: wanting, needing, lust. All her morrow is screaming at her to live, live, live. By the edge of her teeth, live.
And maybe it's telling her to conquer too.
Once a fortune-teller with stolen magic told her that love is not a choice. The charlatan told her that it would take her suddenly, like a shadow overtaking a summer bloom. But that was star-magic, young and foolish, and nothing compared to only magic her soul and memories recognizes.
Because this is a choice.
Al'Zahra is choosing to crest the hill with an echo of the same steps Morrighan, in her wolfish heart, will know belong to her and her alone. She's choosing to toss her chains in a greeting older than their bones, a coquettish song that says in the way of predators, run faster. And she's choosing to hum a song that echoes the crackling of the fires, and the twang of the winter song, with embers catching the dying light smoldering in her gaze. She is choosing all of it.
It's that gaze, the one with embers and hunger, that doesn't leave Morrighan, when she smiles and flicks her tail at the wolf like a doe flicking at a hungry, summer fly. “I'm not sure the lake will hold you if you run that way.” Zahra wonders how many fools of Denocte are cowed by the fury of Morrighan's wrath. She wonders how many of them might turn tail and run with faced with something as apocalyptic as a mare with fire instead of blood and chaos instead of organs.
But she remembers when fire was leeched from the blood of jinn and given to the gods. It's that blood in her veins, watered-down conquest, that coos a greeting to all the bits of Morrighan that are more death than girl. And it's that blood, that mortal blood, that yearns for just a bit of smoke.
@Morrighan
