some by virtue fall; any

[Kushiel]

Kushiel squinted into the sun with blinking, bloodshot eyes. His mouth was dry, and the large stallion opened and closed it several times. He groaned. His head heard, his whole body hurt. With a little bit of trepidation, Kushiel looked back at the sky. It was nearly midday. He groaned again. Damn, where had the time gone?

With no small amount of struggle, Kushiel found his feet. He bumped and collided with the tree at this back on his way up, but eventually found his to standing. He had sworn, time and time again, that he wasn’t going to keep doing this. He was way, way too old for this shit. But no, as it had been before and would be again, he had been lulled by the flames, by the tantalizing way they played along his body, the way they devoured wood and grass. He’d gotten lost in them, and far into the night he had burned.

Now, it the harsh light of day, he was paying the price.

Kushiel tried not to think about what his mother would say if she saw him like this. He tried not to think about was Straia would say. Probably nothing, of course, for she wouldn’t stoop to scold him, but he didn’t like to imagine the way her eyes would settle on him. Kushiel made a visible effort to pull himself together. He stretched his neck, he tried to work the kinks out of his back. He took a few staggering steps, closed his eyes with a groan, then took a few more.

Yes, he was way, way, too old for this.

[Aurane]

We have assembled inside
This ancient and insane theater,

She is not quite like herself, right now. 
She had been fed by that shaded man, and basked, for the winter, in the imagery of his offering: something cloaked in darkness, taking from the trees their purplish shadows and subsuming them to itself; or itself to them.

She is a moth to flames; a greedy magpie. So as she grew fatter and her madness nourished itself on the flux of her body’s elements, so did her fantasies of the growing curiosity inside her ribs. Pacing the iron woods, the red woman had become drawn out and gaunt looking, ravaged by her passenger tossing inside. (She felt penumbral claws reaching down her thighs to meet the grey-green of the jack pines, a proud grotesque.)

But she is so plain, instead. Blue, like her sire, but lacking completely the oddities that made him such a fascination. Had the red woman not found her eyeless treasure she may have loosened herself from the filly by now. But Ribcage seems to find the girl entertaining, and so she lets him have her for himself. 
(In the millisecond blackouts of her blinks, and in the longer preludes of her sleep, Aurane sees the boy become big and morph – magnificent and muscular, bearing otherworldly teeth. And he is the answer to her heady hopes and dream. A conqueror at her fingertips.)

The pair roils alongside her, pressed at length by the fury of her teeth, caught on edge by their incessant neediness.
She is hollow-eyed. Like him. But her reason is far less bacchanalian. It is drudgery, thick like tar weighing her down. Michaelis had shown beautiful carelessness for his kin in finding his way into her. Trusting her was a strange decision; or, he had given it no thought at all.

It is his fire that catches her tired eyes. And she is familiar with fire.
She knows fire. (The firegod said it hurts.) 
And that had been attractive to her. Because in her mind, all things burn or strike mildly, and at her will. She is arrogantly sure of herself. When the deep bay mare closes the gap between them, and his quiet is intruded on by the squawks of young lungs, she smiles and tilts her head, “It would not take much flame to shut them up, would it?” (I wonder what that smells like... maybe... ask him or something...?)

The facetiousness in it is hard to find.
Her eyes flicker with his tame fire, (it catches down his leg and grows wild, and the pine needles go up despite the sog of spring. Ash, and bone. But Ribcage is left, and so is she and he looks at her with carnivore eyes...) 

“I'm Aurane.”

[Kushiel]

Kushiel mercifully, did not have children. He did, however, have a mother who he had abused as a child. As such, he had an unusual sympathy for mothers. It was lingering guilt, his subconscious told him. He was like a catholic who no longer attended mass. He would cross himself on occasion and indulge in a great deal of self loathing, but not actually do anything to rectify the source of his guilt.

Kushiel had his self loathing out in full force today, along with a healthy dose of contempt and pity. It made for a volatile combination, and though Kushiel was entirely threw with smoke and ash, he kept a little flame blazing along his neck. He felt the crackle and pop of the fire and took some consolation it in.  

Kushiel could not count stoicism among his great many virtues. He was, in fact, perfectly alright. He just needed something better than his own misery to occupy his attention. So when the mare appeared, brood of children in toe, he felt instantly better.

Kushiel liked to think that it was their company that he liked, and not the fact that someone seemed more put upon then himself. The mare did not look like motherhood was giving her a warm glow. But, regardless of the reason, Kushiel visibly brightened, and then grinned lopsidedly at her comment.  

“Not much at all. Unfortunately, a good alibi is a lot harder to come by.” His mane blazed a little brighter, a little higher, and the stallion sized up the foals, as if assessing how much fire he would to raze their little bodies. He didn’t, of course, intend to do that. At least not until one of them did something truly beastly. Lucky for them, Kushiel had a high tolerance for beastly. However, from the look in the mare’s eyes, her children may be even worse than he had been as a child. She looked tired, and more than a little pissed. Kushiel couldn’t help it, he grinned again. In response to her name he gave his own.

“Kushiel.” He said with a nod. He glanced to the foals, then back at Aurane.

“We should take you around to teach the fillies about abstinence.” His grin broadened a little bit, becoming wolfish. He didn’t stop to consider that this was probably not what women wanted to hear. He wasn’t done, however.

“Not that I’m a proponent of that.” And then he winked, completely at odds with the tone of the conversation and their bedraggled appearance.

[Aurane]

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.

I am soo embarrassed at how late this is! I'm sorry!