BETTER THE WIND, THE SEA, THE SALT
than this, this, this
than this, this, this
L
itotes? she asks. Who are you?
No.
Not Litotes.
But the woman was already aware, or would not feel the need to ask for Boudika’s identity.
The tigress does not speak again but steps back into the darkness; it becomes her, in the way the night becomes all killers. Her pads feel out the tough, ridged forest floor; beneath them the leaves do not crunch so loudly, nor do the branches snap. The chorus of the night’s nocturnal creatures remains silent as Boudika treads a quiet, tightening circle around the mare.
Boudika wars with herself in that dark space. There is an abyss that opens wide in her soul and screams, and screams, and screams. Boudika answers after an impolite length of time,
No, she whispers. Not Litotes.
Then, with resounding confidence and, perhaps, a feline’s arrogant offense—How could she mistake me for anyone other than who I am?— the tigress says: Boudika.
And she is night and shadow and the apathy of many carnal urges; this is her land and this trespasser comes bearing scents of another court. Boudika thinks, disjointedly, of Antiope’s forever-open gate. Boudika remembers the land of Denocte no longer bars the entrance to the city.
Yet—
she hungers.
She hungers as the sea hungers, fathomless, inevitable. The endless entwinement of life seeking to devour other life, the self-fulfilling prophecy of mortality. In the dark, the tigress licks her chops and reminisces all the kills that have come before; the way that flesh parts so readily beneath the crushing force of her jaws, cleaved more efficiently than any sword or knife could manage—
And there, the pulsing jugular, the vulnerable haunch, the way her instincts cry, and cry, and cry for action.
Instead Boudika transforms somewhere in the darkness, in the undergrowth, and emerges a woman with an appetite only slightly more satiable.
“If you are lost, little girl, I may lead you from the woods.” Her voice is thick with the same silence that exists within the forest in the wake of a predator’s shadow.
@Elena "speaks" space for notes
