Nymeria & Lilómiel

baby, I'm a sociopath / sweet serial killer / on the warpath / 'cause I love you / just a little too much.

Pale quicksilver flexed, cavorted over a statuesque anatomy, a raiment of iron painted over a bronzed heart and ivory bones; ruby eyes, glistening orbs of piercing, haughty red, glanced caustically over the cartilage of the unknown.

Golden-framed architecture pierced upwards, burnished copper glittering in the hazy light of a noonday sun, sparkling with a thousand minuscule dashes of color indescribable and wholly pure. Spun glass, precious and gleaming, stretched between limbs of metal, turned silver with clinging cobwebs and the undignified white netting of tiny arachnids long past and thriving. It was not enough to hide the opulence below, the savagely bright prism of ostentatious origin, the tapestries worked into windows. Colors, like iridescent emerald, beryl, jade, came to be outlining scenes of forestry; azure, cerulean, and sky, painting images tantalizing out of reach of reality; plum, periwinkle, and saturated lavender, burning crimson, scarlet, ruby, old orange and apricot and peach, cheery jaune dancing between. Beautiful. A perfect place for the likes of her, ornate and flushed with juvenile pride.

The egg quivers, perched delicately between determined ivories, tucked and pressed between red tongue and plush roof-of-mouth. Delicate nostrils quiver, full of desirous uncertainty, a tremble working down from her shoulders to hips. Excitement. Toxic, pernicious, violent elation stirred into being by thought of what was to come, of the precious connection spun between girl and child, master and slave.

Easy. Hooves thump down, quiet, on soil dampened from last night's rain, fetlocks brushing by dewy strands of emerald grass piercing up like little soldiers from blackened earth. Hips sway, a gentle rocking emulating the suave curves of her mother's even in her childhood. She plucks her way through budding wildflowers and growing shrubbery, diligent in her care and yet eloquently casual (discreet, perhaps.) On occasion a dark hoof rubs along a spiky tendril of particularly long grass, causing a cascade of water droplets to run up along her legs, beads of cool liquids capering over her neck and shoulders without ever settling into her skin.

Eventually she, dark daughter of sacred bone and ash, drifts to an idle halt. Then, with an industrious informality, she steps through the stream, letting it run and tumble around her legs, soaking knee-downward to the very bone. It hums, sings, burbles to her—child, adult, parent, old mother, dead mother. As she pulls free of it's lecherous embrace, it cries to her, moans to her, and she affords it a second glance, pity gleaming in her eyes as if the quiet, lazy creek was something more sentient than another horse.

Nymeria stands on stone now, pale curtains drifting in the breeze around her. Color glistens on her skin, until she shines as does a butterfly's wings, empyrean and heavenly, utterly alien to the regularity and drabness of the mortal world.

Low is her hum, a gentle murmur pitched from ashen lungs, following a beat inexplicable.
Down she lets her head, and with a tedious care, jaws pry back to deposit a small egg on the hard marble. Minutes trickle by, painfully slow, the tiny sphere rocking back and forth all the while. Cracks, fracture lines, appear, a web of silver marring ebony, splintering through uniform obsidian.

Then it hatches. Reddish, thick fluids pool out from around a spiny body painted in the darkest of blacks, embryonic moisture and vitamins rendered unnecessary by the spawning of the beast. It drips out onto the floor, macabre mess spooling thickly around a woefully fragile, vaguely felidae figurine. Black. What had mother told her? Black, blue, and bronze for the boys; glistening white, green, gold, for the pretty girls; silver, brown, and red for all those who don't give a particular care. A boy then. Her boy. A smile spins into glittering being on her ashen lips, a grin of sheer folly.

Even mother didn't have a dragon, but she did!

For a name. A name. Names were important, precious things. Long and hard she thought, watching over the mess of black coils and ivory fangs that was hers, treasuring the private, deliciously quiet moment, examining every inch of his lissome body and every curve of his soft wings. And then at last she came to conclusion: Lilómiel. The old blood-sucker mother had told her about, the god of war and battle in a land far, far away, he who sat in a throne melted down from the metal of his enemies (she didn't understand swords) and ate any who dare oppose him.

Yes. Lilómiel would do nicely.