[P] you eat us up;

[August]

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

It was the cusp of autumn, which had always been his favorite time in Denocte. It felt distinctly Night Court, the way the days were still hot enough to simmer and swim and the nights were cool enough to light the bonfires and gather in close. August had lost track of how long he’d been home; the leaves were still green on the trees, but the first were starting to shift; his bruises were faded, his limp gone, but he was not back to himself. 

He was also - by the end of the week, depending on how successfully he could sweet-talk his landlord - soon to be homeless. That was ostensibly why he was in this part of town, looking for a place to let; otherwise he’d be playing it feral for a while, and no matter what he pretended he really was a city boy at heart. But it was not apartments that drew him down this street. 

They were nothing like the Scarab, this street of bars and gambling halls; they lacked the sophistication, the air of exoticism, the careless, careful elegance that toed the line with the promise of total debauchery. That’s what August thought, anyway, and the tattoo on his shoulder seemed to prickle with indignation as he turned guiltily into one green-painted, ivy-crawling doorway. He hardly spared a glance for the twisting crimson dragon on the sign; if he had palms they’d be itching. 

He did not trust himself to look around before heading straight to the bar, but the smells and scents were immediately nostalgic. Rich incense, a newly-tapped barrel of wine, the laughter and swearing and background roll of conversation, the flutter of cards and clicking of dice. It might have well have been the rocking of his cradle, the way he relaxed in the smoky air. He had not realized just how much this part of his life had meant home, even if this was a poor (and potentially painful) substitute. 

If he’d been ready for a drink before, now he was parched. August ordered dandelion wine from the bartender and at last let his gaze slide across the room - and at once spied something that made his mouth curve in a half-grin. It was the bay mare from the marketplace the night he’d left Denocte, and the sight of her made the same heat bloom in him he’d felt throughout their brief encounter. He’d never even gotten her name, but he is unsurprised when her gaze lifted to his. August lifted a brow to her, and then his glass when it came a moment later, and didn’t look away as he tipped it to his lips and drank. 

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@Al'Zahra

[Al'Zahra]

The Illuminated

“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”

Tonight she is on the edge, hanging and suspended between wildness and the ferocity of a wildcat freshly cage. The feeling causes her blood to race and spark like lightning. It's begging for the magic it  used to know and devour as intimately as flesh. Inside this form her soul rages against the mortal cage of it, of the hardness of bone and stone.

Outside she is as calm as ever and the muted roar of the crowd is nothing more than pillows upon which her violence lounges as lazily as a cat bloated with a hunt. It paces in her gaze and the others slipping away into vice surely see it when their eyes linger on her but their hooves always turn themselves away from the lion resting, and waiting, and watching.

Hours and empty glasses pass like this. Dealers change, fights beak out and settle down like lambs, and still she does not waiver in her stillness in her banked violence. Outside the moon brightens and the stars gathering themselves up into stories and religion. It all slips by her, unnoticed.

And of course, it would be him, the golden boy with his blood begging to be devoured, that finally presses in through the shroud of violence hanging off her.

He shatters it.

She would tear the world apart for another taste of it, of another night in which there is only sin, and avarice, and not this bit of steel clanging against her teeth. Perhaps she does, when she raises her own glass to his as if there is only fire and dancing between them instead of bodies dew-wet with greed and broken hope. She forgets about everything that tastes like metal instead of liquor, and smells like salt instead of smoke.

The intensity of her gaze does not waiver from his. Not even when she bows her head in a gesture that says, in a way older than the stone beneath their hooves, come.

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@August

[August]

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

August knew how the night was going to go. He’d stay at the bar, drink wine until he let himself make bad decisions, tease and laugh with the other patrons, try to avoid the tables. Stumble ‘home’ hours later and wake too early all muzzy-headed, having accomplished none of the things he’d needed to do.

But when she raised her glass in return, when she dipped her head and her hair slipped like smoke along the curve of her neck - then the night opened up. Then there were as many possibilities as there were stars, and all of them were shining.

He wound his way to her, ignoring the bodies that slipped past like fish, ignoring the clatter of bone dice and the thought of fortunes won or lost. There was a better diversion here, one who didn’t make him feel like a fool - one who didn’t make him feel like anything at all, except fire and nerve-endings and hunger well-sated. It was a rare thing, getting August out of his own head, but she had done it with a look. The palomino wanted badly for it to happen again.

And maybe he was in luck (luck, that fickle mistress, for the first time since he’d left Denocte) because her eyes were already devouring. When he slid alongside her it was a struggle not to go ahead and touch first his lips and then his teeth to the place just behind her ear; he took another long swallow as a diversion.

When he set the glass down wine wet the side of it, a trickle of gold cast in firelight. “Come here often?” he asked her, his voice as smooth and warm, playing like they are strangers, like she is anything comparable to the others in this smoke-filled room. And August found that he was curious, even if he could not picture her having something so mundane as a routine.

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@'Al'Zahra'

[Al'Zahra]

The Illuminated

“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”

There is desire and then there is devastation. Both live in her, embers and wildfires, caught between the fragile skin of a desert-bred woman. She is both silk and chain, lash and feather. And she is smoldering when he join her with the smile of a almost-man begging for destruction and calling  the flash of heat against his throat desire.

Al'Zahra promises herself, that by the end of tonight, she will teach him the difference between an ember and a wildfire.

Where he shows restraint she has none to share (not with the feeling of steel aching against her jaw). The space between them dissolves like the smoke on her tongue. Like golden patterns of magic used to dissolve into the places between her heart and soul. She touches him, paints him in lines of skin, teeth and liquor, from cheek to ear. In the ocean of him she drowns herself because she is so, so sick of only the taste of embers.  

The next sip of her drink does nothing to quench her thirst, or hunger, or reckless need to pick apart this flesh until she discovers again the ferociousness of her first. She starts to feel like flint, and steel, and forest-wood in winter, when she pulls her lips from the hard planes of his face. Her smile has not teeth but bits of sand begging for brine. “Often enough.” She laughs and it's bell-chimes beneath the roaring din of the crowd and the thud of bone dice.

“You didn't drown at sea.” The pillows whisper under her weight as she learns towards him and rests her chin against his withers. “And I didn't think I would care.” An orphan places two more drinks on the table. She does not bother to see if they are correct, only that they are there before she slides one towards him.

Her own tastes like brine and sugar when she raises her chin from him just enough to take a take. “Why did you come back? This world is as dull as it has always been.” And the spark in her eyes when she looks at him, really looks, says that they could change it all.

art credit


@August

[August]

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

It did not occur to him that she might be as broken as he until she greeted him with a kiss that lingered, that turned into a bite, that shivered up to his ear until he felt like nothing but gold-plated nerves.

August had met, charmed and bedded many people with a hunger as ravenous (if not as bold), but all of them were broken in some way. Usually it was obvious - they were lonely, or jealous, or desperate - and always when he discovered their secret he thought ah, so that is why you’re here with me. He thought he was done with secrets, with no use for them anymore, but he finds it isn’t true. He wants to know hers.

But not yet. Not when it felt so good to be wanted, not when her need matched (perhaps outpaced) his own, not when he’d forgotten how much better the burn from a kiss felt than the one from a fist-fight. August drank slowly, and noticed how she did not. He let his body fit firm against all the curves of hers, and the times she met him with teeth or lips he replied in kind.

It was his turn to laugh, low and soft, as she rested her chin between his shoulders. The familiarity of the action, as though they are old lovers, makes him ache in a way he’d rather ignore. “I’m as surprised as you.” August doesn’t say to which part, doesn’t point out that what she said did not necessarily mean she did care; he’s not in a hurry to dispel the slow fox-smile the words put on his mouth.

“I guess I didn’t find what I was looking for.” He doesn’t know what they put in his glass; it tasted a little like the sea, salt-sour, the kind of thing that only made you thirstier. Her eyes drank down the dim light of the bar, looking endless, a well of gold, something fathomless you could fall into. He wondered what she saw in his own, but not enough to ask. “You don’t strike me as the kind to tolerate a dull world.” Once, he’d thought the same of himself. “Tell me what you’d change it to.”

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@Al'Zahra

[Al'Zahra]

The Illuminated

“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”

The hole where her magic (her fire) had once been has no bottom, no end, no beginning. It is a consuming blackness, a hunger, a need to pull apart each soul she meets silver thread by silver thread. She is more want than girl, more lust than dance, more everything than a god.

What lives in her is an echo in his eyes, a black sliver beneath his moonlight. She can see it, like looking at the shard of a mirror she shattered last night when the feelings exploded out of her and soothed nothing. They only consumed.

They always consume, and consume, and consume and there is still more of this world to taste.

And she thinks there are a hundred other worlds and a hundred other men like him, and woman like Morrighan, to taste and touch and destroy. She does not pause to wonder if it will soothe her, or free her.

She only knows that she will. Over and over again until there is not a single whole heart left in his world. And maybe then, maybe the mortals would have nightmares of all the things they have destroyed with greed. Maybe they might understand the suffering, the ache, the need that there is nothing left to own in the world.

She does not question what he was looking for.

She drags her teeth along this neck, his ears, the hollows above his eyes. The touch promises so much more that her words when she whispers to him lip to lip. “I want the embers of a dead world. I want wolves and battlefields. I want music that is louder than thunder. I want everything and if I could I would change the entire world to suit me.” And when she exhales directly into his lungs she's not talking to the man decked in gold and silver.

It's the restless soul she wants, the heart that's broken but not shattered. Her lungs sing to his and her heart howls to his like a wolf calling another wolf home, home, home.

“Tell me the name of the ship you sailed on and maybe I can find all the things you could not.” She pulls away, her lungs inhale the dirty air instead of him, her heart stumbles in her chest. She does not touch him in any other way than her rib-cage to his.

Cage to cage.

And she waits.

art credit


@August

[August]

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

August is too much a man to guess what she truly is, that she is something wild and strange wearing the face of a mare. He could guess a thousand histories for her and never come close to the real thing.

It’s easy enough to pretend he might know her when her teeth whisper language across his skin that his body understands where his ears do not. It is not kind, that touch, or gentle - and yet he closes his eyes against it, arches his neck beneath it, half waits to feel blood bloom from her kisses and slide warm and rich as liquor down his golden skin. He has never minded a rough touch, remembers treating her in kind, and anticipates doing so again tonight.

So when she speaks, it takes him a moment to blink from the hazy stupor of heat between bodies and listen to her. And when he does listen - as much feeling her words as hearing them, each whispered word a ghost over his own lips - he studies her with a clarity hitherto unpossessed.

Her words sound a little mad, a little violent. Yet hadn’t he known both those things burned in her just watching her dance, and dancing (‘dancing’) with her? He couldn’t lean entirely on liquor and restlessness as an excuse to not guess that a wildfire might live beneath her burnished skin. What she says quickens his blood, bows his head. And when she breathes into his lungs, it tastes like ash and magic, like the air after lightning has struck, better than anything you could pour into a glass.

He wants to say I want those things too, but it would be a lie. August is no revolutionary, no god, no thing made for burning. He wants adventure, but only enough to make the comforts of home more comfortable.

When she pulls away, when she asks for the name of his ship, his smile is a touch distant, a hint sardonic. The ship he sailed, that simple merchant vessel, is not the one she wants. But he knows the one she does - he can picture it, ominous even at dock, indigo-sailed and stained gray as a storm. “Find the Charon,” he says, and puts his mouth to the pulse of her throat. “But find it tomorrow. Stay with me tonight.”

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@Al'Zahra

[Al'Zahra]

The Illuminated

“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”

Tonight. He says the word like a prayer spoken to the slumbering god-of-fire in her blood. His lips are twin altars, his ears two cross-tips, his pulse the low thrum of a heart finding salvation. The prayer, his prayer, wakes her up as much as anything does in this mortal cage. Her pulse quickens and each hum of her heart is an ache sinking into the marrow of her bones and pulling her apart.

And she is coming apart-- hair by hair, bone by bone, note by note of that song only she can heart.

Between them slumbers the things gods and lions are made of. There is hunger (there is always hunger). There is blood begging to dissolve in the darkness of their tangling shadows. There is lust smoldering at the dead-wood of their morals. There are a million things, a million of pieces of her reforming beneath the prayer power of his want.

There is an ending, a silence, a tomb hanging across this thing between them that will never (can never) be.

Al'Zahra, the last of her kind, knows that she should lament it's loss. She knows that she should lament a hundred other endings (love, and lust, and motherhood). But she only welcomes them her the gap-jaw of a lion and the wrath of a god. She begs for them, for the end of every cell of this new fragile form of hers.

She begs.

And she begs him.

With a kiss to his throat and a scratch of teeth at the curl of his jaw she answers his prayer. Each of her chains is singing when she stands. Her eyes, her golden molten eyes, are swirling like dragon smoke with the slow-blooded rush of liquor and the hot-rush of need Each tooth is a star in her black mouth when she smiles at him like that wolf on the battlefield.

“Take me home.” She demands. And the way home sits on her tongue tastes just as sweet as every other lie she has given out in this terrible, mortal, wicked place.

Tonight she will make four walls out of his form.

And tomorrow she will forget how salted and sweet the stone of him tasted on her tongue.

art credit


@August

[August]

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

When she kisses him, just below the jawline, just above the pulse, he knows that tonight, at least, he won’t be lonely.

And that’s enough, even when she says home like it’s a place he can still go, a door he can open. It doesn’t matter what his mind does, what it laments, when his heart kicks up to a quicker rhythm and his blood runs just a degree hotter. Tonight, the body is enough.

He says nothing more, only leaves the last of his coins on the table with a knock, like an offering to the ferryman. Then he rises, his gaze anchored to hers, and leads her from that warm, loud room into the quiet, cold streets and to a place that is not home for either of them. But it will do well enough, for two transient ghosts.

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