Fire burned in her veins, begging to be let out, to be unleashed. Set free to dance along her skin, to spark with the racing of her heart, to ignite with the force of her fury, anything. And it was so hard to ignore the desperate, aching yearning that hummed and thrummed with the rush of blood and fire through her veins, spreading to every cell of her body, whispering, murmuring, crooning sweet little nothings in her ear.

She could never resist for long.

Each time she gave in, though, pain flooded her senses, drowning the need for the flame beneath the weight of endless agony, a vicious torment that cackled with glee, that sneered with sick satisfaction as she writhed and squirmed and beg--no. Not begged. She never begged.

She would never beg.

To beg would be to let that bitch win.

Even months after the fire had returned and devoured them in bitter conflagration, she still ached for the sky. Once, she had been happy with the fire dancing around her, slinking around her legs, flickering along her skin, warming her in a shower of sparks. Now she sometimes dared the torture and coaxed the fire into the shape of wings sprouting from the old scars along her back, just to feel like she had them once again. Even if the fire was not solid enough to lift her, even if she felt no fluttering of the breeze rustling her feathers, she still dreamed of what was gone.

Would she always dream of what was gone?

Fire, father, wings, childhood, home, all devoured in their god’s vindictive cruelty, warped or twisted or stripped away from her because she had refused to believe she deserved what Beqanna had wrought. Lilitha’s lip curled in disdain, gold eyes glaring at the world around her, daring it to throw something more her way. And why not? She had not recanted. She would not recant. She would not apologize, would not grovel at Beqanna’s feet and beg for mercy.

Rage warred with the fire in her veins, burning too hot, searing her insides until she ought to have been no more, burned to ash in the heat of it. Still she stood, the firelight only flickering in her eyes instead of flowing across her skin and down her mane and tail, instead of dancing in the air around her, sparks taking on lives of their own in a jubilee she’d once known so well.

What a joke. Such innocent naivete could not survive a world so cold.

Nor had it.

She felt his eyes on her and stood a little taller, defiance written in the flare of her nostrils, the arch of her thick neck, the cool, calm way she slowly turned her head to meet his gaze. He was too far away and it was too dark for her to see the color, just some indeterminate shade of pale in the moonlight, but that same light gleamed along his wet skin, dripping from his mane, running in rivulets down the hard muscles of his neck and shoulder. Some fell splashing to the ground, while others caressed his limbs, licking along his skin on their way back to the earth.

She let her gaze travel everywhere the water touched him, working her way slowly from head to toe and back again as he ambled toward her, stopping just at the edge of touching distance. Then he stood before her, his eyes (blue-grey, they were the color of the sea) watching her with the same intensity she’d turned on him. And when he greeted her with such a sweet little pet name, she tilted her head, mirroring the tiny smile on his face back at him.

“Hello yourself.”