scorch

[Scorch]

WATCH THE FLAMES CLIMB HIGH INTO THE NIGHT

She dreamt of him more nights than not.

Him, and others - but mostly him. The taste of him on her tongue was one she would never forget, or at least, she had yet to; the image of him may have begun to fade, but his taste hadn't. She feels him, too, in her dreams, tall and strong just like her; they are often in their prime. Sometimes they were old and dying, a dream of their first ending which should also have been their last. Sometimes, they were in the grey afterlife, cold to the touch and yet still warmed the presence of one another.

But as I said, there were sometimes others. The magician she'd bedded and born children for came to speak to her, though she never decided whether the phantom Brennen was real and penetrating her dreams, or simply a figment thereof. More recently, a woman; from times before, from the days before her Amazonian reign. Brunhild; she dreamt of Brunhild, and the contents of her mind found themselves drawn exclusively to the dark and the twisted, though she rarely didn't find pleasure within those things. After all, she'd found it once, in real life, between the once-Queen's thighs.

It would seem that she had a tendency to bed once-royals whose names began with B. She had to keep some semblance of pattern in her life; otherwise, she would just be a whore, with no poetics about it.

Tonight, however, she dreamt only of the one whom she truly loved. "Ti amo, mio fuocco." Words she'd not heard uttered since the day of her husband's disappearance. They made her smile, but also squirm in her sleep; the vision faltered, then slowly re-stabilized. She knew consciously that she did not deserve to hear those tender, loyal words - but her subconscious gave way to greed and glutton, desperately self indulgent for a nicety that did not even exist.

Scorch!

The single word, yelled above the tree tops with the intensity and tone that could belong to but one man, woke the mare. As she blinked the sleep from her dragon eyes, a vomit-inducing dread washed over her, the tightness in her chest which had led to her bedding Brunhild now threatening to tear her apart from the top of her seams to the bottom. The pressure felt insurmountable, and to her great shame, she hesitated. Considered turning away from the call and dismissing it as an illusion of her dream; considered running out of Nerine and never coming back, of calling to Brennen and bidding her stay with her in the place of her choosing forever. It wouldn't be so bad, living in solitude with a magician.

Alas, the part of her that still loved Hestoni (that is to say, the whole of her) wholeheartedly refused these crazed thoughts, taking charge of the woman's legs while her mind fell to shambles within. She closed her eyes periodically and tried to force herself back to sleep, imagining the sounds of the jungle around her, imagining that the forest around her stood ten times as densely, until true twilight surrounded her at every turn.

It was hard, without Hestoni, and she had resorted to the back-stabbers way of dealing with that fact. Now, to her further discreditment, she played the coward; stumbling closer to her downfall with nary a single defense in mind. What she had done was wrong, a blatant, severe crime against the sacrament of their marriage. She thought of Leilan's angry words, of how Ea choked on Brennen's name, and of how Shahrizai had looked at her as though he no longer knew her.

She feared much, much worse on behalf of he who she crawled to, mewling and pitiful.

Upon the crest of a rocky hill, she spotted him, moving dazedly across the landscape. The sight of his broad red shoulders easily plowing through the tall snows at one elated her and defeated her; she wanted to cry for joy and for shame. For now, she settled on neither, the internalized energy creating ever more pressure just beneath her skin.

And just like that, they began to speak all at once. Their voices, familiar now yet still alarming when coming unbidden, caused the mare to cloak herself in twilight, rendering her invisible; the clamor of ghosts within the small area of her mind felt like blood being pumped into her already full veins. She tried to speak and to quiet them, but they would not listen; the man she loved came closer and closer with each minute that she struggled against the voices; and, panicked, she resorted to pure impulse.

"STOP!"

At the exact moment she screamed the word, her skin erupted into living flame, and the voices stopped. Not only this, but she realized upon opening her eyes and shedding her now-useless invisibility, that Hestoni had stopped dead in his tracks at her command, looking for all the world like he had that first day in the meadow. She wanted to scream again because of this, to scream and scream and scream, until the time came that it all went black.

But the newborn fire lining every inch of her body spoke to how impossible such a task would be.

Unable to scream for fear of it all, she stood: reborn, though she yearned to die.

Scorch

Once Khaleesi of the Amazon Jungle

@[Hestoni] uh oh.