i can feel the flames on my lips; crimson blood on my skin
Starlace lets him touch her, lets him draw a line down her back with his black lips. His humor- if that is what it is, merits a half-hearted attempt at a cow-kick before he pulls away, but she is mollified by the continued existence of her descendents. Well, she was for a moment anyway, and then recalls that the quiet of Beqanna is as much their fault as any others. How watered down have her progeny become, that Beqanna sits so happily in a bloodless lull? She had been sure that at least some of them would be enough to make her proud. Neither of Set’s women had been strong enough, she assumes; perhaps that is why he’d had to have both of them. At least he is still alive, she muses, he can try again and prove to her that he deserves his place as her favorite.
Or perhaps she will make another favorite.
A while, Infection says, and Starlace decides that perhaps it will not be with him.
“A pity,” she says to his admission that the world has greatly changed. Or perhaps a blessing, given that she has returned to it changed as well.
Infection’s query as to the timing of her return is met with a shrug; she is no more aware than he is. One moment she had been dead – gloriously, powerfully dead – and the next she was not. The body that she wears looks like the one she’d once inhabited, but her true flesh has long ago filled the belly of scavengers and her skeleton was pounded to bone-white sand decades past. This body is something different, something better.
“Do you live somewhere here?” Starlace asks, “Or do you just skulk in the shadows?” For all her innate awareness that this way is Hyaline and that way Tephra, the grey mare does not have a meaning for those words. Her knowledge of the world she’s returned to has come in bits and pieces. “What are these new places? What is a Loess? A Nerine?”
Starlace
@[Infection]