[AW] in desperate music wound

[Warset]

“Someday, the stars will reach back.”

Warset had finally discovered the danger of the dark. 

A week ago she had woken up in the grave of a fallen star. There had been miles of sand around and eons of stars  above her head winking down a cool farewell. She had opened her wings to return to them, to say in the way of stardust and flight-feathers, I am not gone. But she had only claws that dung into the cooling sand and fur lifting in a ridge down her spine as the fear grew, and grew, and grew inside her bones. It grew until she consumed her, until she had run to the nest of a sand viper.

It stopped growing when her wildcat belly was full of blood and muscle. 

Sleep had taken her then, the sleep of a predator comfortable in its violence. But it had been the sleep of a heartbroken star who no longer cared what became of the magic in her silver blood. 

Now, walking beneath the sun that warms her skin, that has always known only the cold, moonlight spaces between stars and constellations, she cannot help but think there is a beauty in the dangers of the dark. That there is something to be said for the violence of her form when it's by way of tooth, claw, and pride that she can fill the gnawing hungry beast in her belly. Here she doesn't have the waters of the cosmos to slake her thirst. 

Here, beneath the judgmental sun, she has only the quickness of her teeth and the cleverness of her feathers. Already an apple is sitting in her stomach, heavier with guilt instead of substance. She carries her wings close to her sides, trying to hide away the shine of her skin that suggests star-dust instead of sweat. There is the way she blinks long and slow, like she's deep in thought instead of fighting a war of fear in the space behind her eyes. Everything about her screams 'other', but Solterra is too full of life and sunlight to notice a star in their midst who looks at the sky too often and too long (as if she can see something behind the clouds that no one else can). 

But when there is a step behind her at the same time a merchant yells too loudly, the feel of being overwhelmed sends her spinning around quick as a leopard. And there is in her gaze, silver and moonlit, a thing looking beyond the shadow of her wings that is not wholly horse, or cat, or sane. 

Because a week ago the stars did not answer her back. 

[August]

I'm the hero of this story
I don't need to be saved

August, in a nice change from recent events, can’t believe his good fortune.

He is sure the stallion some twenty meters ahead of him in the thick throng is the bastard who’d attacked Aghavni; the color and the stature are etched in his memory. Casually he follows, keeping his distance, feigning interest in this rug or that brooch while keeping an eye on his target, willing him to turn his head and betray those tiger’s eyes.

When it happens, it nearly backfires; a merchant just to his right shrieks (August finds their voices unmelodic, their calls rude compared to the musicality and humor of Denocte’s dealers) and many heads swivel their direction, including the one he’s trailing. Unwilling to be discovered, August turns his face away, stepping ungracefully to the side - and almost into the velvet-dark hindquarters of a black mare.

She whirls cat-quick and August draws back, his eyes lifting from the collar that winks like diamonds under the sunlight to a gaze like and not-like the silver of his own. There is something about the way she stands that makes him think of a hunter, crouched and tensed to spring, though she is taller than him and this is no forest but a midday marketplace.

Still, it’s a new enough place to him to feel dangerous, and the tension between her shoulders lies coiled in himself.

“Easy there,” he says, the same gentle tone he’d use on one of the wilder dragons that roved the streets of Denocte. “I’m sorry if I startled you, I was just looking for someone-“

Someone long gone by now, if it had been them at all. August’s gaze shifts to rake the narrow market, seeing no sign of the chestnut stallion with kohl-rimmed eyes. Shit. Caligo knew he’d probably never see the man again, but if he did it’d be at the point of his sword.

He swallows his sigh and summons a smile when he turns back to the stranger. Her color alone, like midsummer midnight, makes him miss the Night Court, but he’s mostly impervious to homesickness by now. “This place is an ordeal,” he mutters, raising a brow at her like they are co-conspirators, strangers bound by circumstance.

More likely he is only further offending some born-and-bred Solterran, and (given what he liked to assume about the culture) the next thing she’ll do is pull out a dagger of ornate beauty and important origin and make him pay for his insult.



@Warset

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[Warset]

“Someday, the stars will reach back.”

It takes her body longer than it should to remember that there is the sand and stone beneath her hooves instead of stardust and blackness. Her heart is racing beneath her chest like wild thing running both to and from the kill. Even her lungs are heaving, aching, humming when she finally remembers to breathe. And when she does inhale it's to the flavor of the market and the sweat on the stallion's skin-- starlight and sun.

Each feather whispers like a leaf in the thick, night forest as she tucks them back to her sides. The chain below her throat swings to a metronome echo of her racing, stumbling heart beat. Somewhere, in the bits of memories between the language of the stars, is the instinct that has her staring too deeply into his eyes. The star in her screams a hello, it clamors against the curl of her ribs, it wants to brush their cheeks together in the way of the war-children stars.

But the part of her that's hungry, that knows what it's like to look at a form running through the sand and dream only of the things beneath flesh, looks at him and screams something darker than hello. Every aching, stumbling heartbroken part of her has her leaning away form his shadow. And when she cocks her head at him it's with the look of a wildcat. “Who?” Perhaps there should be words around the only word her throat can bear to hold, perhaps there should be a hundred other things she knows to say but hasn't yet learned the shape of.

She still has not taken her silver eyes from his.

Night is still far off, and somewhere in the market someone is humming a tune that makes her skin tremble to her it. Warset knows there is perhaps a logic to this madness of horse and hunger, sweat and sand, chaos to song. But she has not learned to divine it in the way she could divine the lives of her sister stars by the rhythm of their light. It's why she finally takes her eyes from his and tells her feathers to cease their whispering. It's why she finally makes hear heart beat like a living thing (instead of like a dying thing). “Why is it like this?” Because if there is a reason to this, to any of this, she does not know it.

And perhaps, for the first time, when her tongue tastes the word why, it does not make her feel lost and forsaken.

[August]

I'm the hero of this story
I don't need to be saved

To his relief she does not pull a dagger on him, though her eyes are no less sharp and silver, and they have yet to stray from his own.

There is a part of him still chasing after the man in the marketplace, wondering what alleys he’s winding down, what shadowed places he’s using to hide. August knows he couldn’t have been alone in his attempt to assassinate Aghavni; that somewhere like a nest of vipers are evil men planning evil deeds. But with each heartbeat and each rainbow pattern of diamond that washes like moonlight or jaguar-spots over the pegasus’s neck, his anger recedes. He was never much for hunting, anyway. Such violent revenge was never his particular talent, no matter his skill with weaponry. (Still he thinks he would have no problem putting teeth to throat. He will search again.)

In the brightness of the day and the dark shadows of her skin it takes him a moment to see the garnet at her throat, a sickle moon. He would like to admire it further, but her wide-eyed gaze draws him back like a lodestone. August is not sure he has ever been looked at in such a way, though he can’t quite say what that way is. Something terribly young and new, or ancient as the world; something both wild and wondering.

“A red stallion with golden eyes like a cat,” he says, in the unlikely circumstance she knows him. “A bit gangly and ragged. Not nearly so handsome as me.” He reaches for his usual smile; it feels duller here under the winter sun. He has been called vain before (by Minya at least, and he’s sure there are more) for the care he takes with his braids and his coat and even polishing the ring in his nose; she’d always rolled her eyes at his explanation that his success depended as much on his looks as hers did. But since the ship, since leaving the Scarab, he has abandoned such habits. So intent is this stranger’s stare that he has to make an effort not to feel self-conscious.

At last she looks away, and now it is his turn to watch as she settles her glossy feathers against her sides. There has been no cessation in the chaos of the market; others are starting to give them dirty looks for blocking the pathway, and August looks up and narrows his eyes at a seller who has been edging nearer, no doubt hoping for a captive audience.

“Because a thousand years of sun and heat have addled their brains, leaving arrogance and brutishness as their defining characteristics.” Now he can really feel the stares from those surrounding them; he flashes his best it’s a joke grin and flicks his tail, at the same time ignoring the niggling feeling of guilt. He knows Anghavni would not appreciate his remarks, and he should know better than to make them. He doesn’t even truly believe them. Much.

August looks back at her, that diamond-flake shine just a hint in the daylight like the glimmer of stars through a veil. “What brings you here today? With a necklace like yours, I’m surprised you’re not swarmed with merchants right now.”


@Warset

credits

[Warset]

“Someday, the stars will reach back.”

Here she can feel the world revolving beneath her hooves. Each grain of sand seems like a suggestion vibrating between the present and the future. It's in the market pressing in around them, in the gazes that seems to blink both slower and faster than she thinks they should. Everything presses in against the space around her, like blackness, like stardust, like the endless loop of a noose.

She could suffocate here in the winter heat, drown in the sweat and the dust. And like all children of war who remember the gore and the beautiful silence, she trembles at the power this chaos.

He is the one still thing in the sea, the sun in the storm, the halo of a far off star one only seen from a distance in  (the echo of a dream). Warset moves closer to him, because there is a merchant pressing in at her back that makes her think of blades against throats and holes chewed out of blackness so that there might be light. It makes her heart tremble in her chest like a caught leaf on a copse, to move closer to him like he's an anchor and she a broken sail. It makes her feel like a lie, like a half-whispered hallelujah, like a war-song whispered against satin instead of blood.

It makes her feel like girl instead of like a star.

And she hates it.

“I could help you find him.” Warset says the words not because she wants to but because there is a wildcat in her bones that wants to hunt. Each of her words is a wish, a bit of dust in the wind, a broken flag of a dead king turning to strings. Maybe she only said them to remind herself she's a star, a universe, and there is nothing, nothing, nothing, she does not almost remember seeing. The feathers at her side rustle, as if begging for flight, or anything just to stop feeling the sand vibrate under her hooves. She steps closer.

She is bred from the darkness, with stardust instead of blood, moonlight instead of organs and so she does not question that the sunlight makes things brutish and arrogance. Had she not already seen it with the way she's forced to steal just to fill her belly with something other than flesh and blood? Or in the way the merchants are pressing in closer, and closer, and closer, each time she lifts her head in a way that speaks of nobility with the blood of gods instead of mortals. Already her blood is humming, and aching, and racing in a way that has everything to do with survival.

Like a leopard she's been broken down to the most arcane of instincts. And she would like to think it's the curse, but she knows the truth. Oh she knows.

The ring on his nose is almost blinding, moon-silver in the way that her own eyes are. Warset can hardly tear her gaze from it, for it makes her heart thrum with something more than fear and hunger. It's easier to look at than his eyes. She blinks, long and slow, like a jungle creature watching the birds come alive. “They cannot have it.” Perhaps if she knew it carried the wildcat she would have torn it from her neck. But war-children are a hungry sort, and Warset is no less.

And that story is in the quiver of her flesh that shifts from fear to fury and back again.  

@August

[August]

I'm the hero of this story
I don't need to be saved

She moves a little closer and it reveals another faint scattering of markings on her neck, her shoulder. She moves a little closer and her scent, warm and dusty and wild, reveals itself over the spice and perfume and sweat of the marketplace. It doesn’t surprise him at all that he prefers it. In all likelihood he could hate it and still prefer it.

When she offers to help him, he considers her with an arched brow, his silver eyes flat as mirrors. Or maybe it’s hers that are the mirror, since he can read nothing in them but his own thoughts, his own empty wanting.

“I’d like that,” he says, and pushes away what he knows Aghavni would think (nothing good, he is sure). What this stranger might think, too, if she knew it wasn’t a friend he was looking for, or what he planned to do if he found him. When the pegasus moves another few inches closer their noses almost touch; he bends his muzzle toward her and then away, as though suddenly shy, though he is anything but. August still can’t quite get a read on her; she seems at once wary and hunter-intent, a falcon that could be lured with blood or startled away with one too-quick movement.

When he speaks of the merchants he casts an eye over them, too. It reminds him of being on the gambling floor of the Scarab, or maybe in one of the back rooms with the dancing girls; he knows that even those who have their eyes turned elsewhere are still watching. As for the rest, they make him think of hyenas, hanging back, waiting for a weakness or any kind of in.

August is not going to give them one, no matter the charms of their wares. And when the stranger answers his smile is a sharp thing, glad to know she feels the same - though he’d meant more they’d pressure her to buy than sell. In his country, or this one, or any other, such diamonds signaled wealth immeasurable. He wonders again who she is - a youth of some ancient Solterran house, looking for excitement beyond her family’s estate? In that case, she was probably waiting for the right time to pay him back for his remarks. So be it; he’d welcome the excitement.

“That the spirit,” he says, and gives her a smile curved like a scimitar. “Time to get out of here, anyway - our quarry disappeared that way.” He indicates the eastern end of the street, in the direction of the heart of the city, and begins again to walk. August notices but doesn’t remark on the gazes that follow them, sharp enough to draw blood.

“I’m August,” he tells her, tossing the name over his shoulder like its weightless - which it is now, here and everywhere.



@Warset

credits

[Warset]

“Someday, the stars will reach back.”

She tries not to think about how strange it feels to follow the sun instead of the tail of a comet or a bass bellow of a war-drum beat out with the fiery pulse of a star. And she tries not to linger on the vibrating sand beneath her feet and the gravity turning her feathers to blades made of lead at her side. Warset tries not to think about a hundred things: the dust pooling in her eyes like cosmic waster, the merchants and their mortal grotesqueness, the way the crowd presses in like maggots instead of silvery specters of moonlight.

But no matter how hard she tries it rushes in like a swarm of beasts, each thought rooting inside her bones like a maggot instead of a flower. Each eats her alive, grounds her, turns her into a thing of sand and stone instead of light and stardust. Warset presses her nose to his hip as she follows him and revels in the heat of him because it makes her feel like fire, like starlight, like a thing not caught in a cage.

If the urge to touch, to combine the bits of them into a newborn constellation is abnormal Warset does not know it. This feels natural, to press their skin together like two pieces of the same story and think only of the whole not the individual. With her skin pressed hard into the bone beneath his skin she can almost close her eyes and feel like she's back in the blackness between the pinpricks of life.

He feels like an old battleground: honor, golden, frothed with heat, hungry.

There is only silence to meet his words at first, only her following him like the frayed end of a rope wrapped around his throat. There only the mercury blaze of her eyes when he turns to look at her. There is only them. Until.. “I am Warset.”. She stresses the war without realizing it, without knowing the way her eyes flare like a falling star burning to death as it races for the desert. Her teeth ache beneath her lips and she's not sure how to make it all stop. So she presses those to his hip too, like a hungry thing trying to ground herself into the soil and hidden magma.

Nor does she stop follow him, not even when the question why starts to grown inside her thoughts like a a thorn-bush. Warset, only presses her skin closer to his and follows him through the merchants, the sun lowering each moment, and the heat towards the hunt.

And she tries too keep all the rooted deadly thoughts in the dirt of her gravity stricken wings and all the thoughts of hunting and war in the star part of her still dreaming, floating and singing in the black sky.  

@August

[August]

I'm the hero of this story
I don't need to be saved

He is surprised by her touch on his hip; his skin shivers beneath it like something shy or wild. It has not been so long since much of his work came from touching strangers like this - first gently as a whisper, then firmly like a thumb to ripe fruit, enough to bruise. But it feels like a different lifetime, another man. August isn’t sure what to do with the realization that he misses it. That touch makes him feel real in a way little else can.

Warset, she names herself, and he sees the way her eyes flare like a comet over the desert or a blade tilted toward the sun. Neither does he miss the way she emphasizes the first syllable, and that, too, feels like tapping into the man-he-was.

The desert, he thinks, will always bring him war.

He has turned away again before her teeth press into his skin (more warm ripe fruit, now bitten) so she does not see the expression that flickers across his fine-boned face - swift, small pain, and a sweet-bitter twisted kind of longing. And then he tosses his head, back to golden bravado, and wills their shadows longer, bigger behind them as they walk.

“Well, Warset,” he says, because he can’t quite take the silence, “let’s go hunting.”



@Warset

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