some by virtue fall; any - Printable Version

We have assembled inside
This ancient and insane theater,

She was fashioned in the image of her mother.
Bold and red, and deep black; curved and angled just like her.
And yet, in the days following her discovery of the boy, she had managed to track her down. (It had not been hard. Great beasts of blood, clawed and toothed, had risen from the small speckles of her trail, and had shown her the way.) And Aurane knew at once that they were different in the most fundamental ways.

She had reeked of old blood, and new. Her skin was like fine ribbon; deep, white fat and flesh showed in long claw marks down her shoulder and sides. And yet alive. Somehow. It would be too easy, to be rid of her like that. And when Aurane had asked Crone if it was the boy who had done this, she looked at her like she was crazy (a familiar look), and asked if he was okay.
‘You’d like to know.’
Crone had staggered to her knees, spitting and hissing and heaving like some wretched beast, cursing her daughter and demanding her son.
‘If he didn’t, then what did?’
But her dam's tale was lost on the red woman, thinking only about her dreams of orange eyes and sinewy shoulder blades.
‘He’s mine.’

It is not by some maternal desire that Aurane has these things ambling at her side. It was by lust, and by chance. A common story, but in no time she would free herself from the bonds, piece by piece, but clinging the boy to her breast and keeping him fat and healthy. She smiles, watching the flicker of tamed flame down his neck, blinking at it. She had become particularly taken with fire, it would seem. Seeing it her lusty dreams, and being increasingly graced with its motif in her moments of… lesser lucidity.
She can smell smoke on him, acrid and yet somehow comforting.
She wonders what kind of power he contains. If he and Kingslay, would the world become one great conflagration – them dancing around it with melted skin and hair, in tribal dance.

She opens her mouth, perhaps to say that they would need no alibi. That the girl could go up in a flash and no one would care, and that in truth, she would shield the boy until the burn on her back got too bad, and then she’d give him up too, albeit more reluctantly. And nobody would care about that either. But she simply laughs instead, nodding as if the humour was there all along. “I am rather creative. I will let you know if I come up with anything… solid.”

She turns her black-brown eyes to the foals, now standing face to face, babbling at each other. The black boy, with his eyeless sockets, constantly presses his nose into the blue filly’s shoulder or cheek to make she is still within reach. She turns back to Kushiel, lewdly admiring the brightness of the blaze, and shrugs, “they don’t have names.”
She hadn’t bothered.

When he speak of abstinence, she humpfs and nods a bit. It wouldn’t be so bad, if Michaelis’ shadows had just done their job properly.
She cocks her head, “mmm, but then our society and species would collapse, and what would we do then?” She has seen the world without them, remote and empty. Pine trees and waves cutting shorelines like saws, and it would be better, more tranquil – but it is boring. Dull as hell without their fire. Their shadows. Their wild double-forms. Their sex and their machinations.