beloved

There is the crunch of dead leaves being pulverized beneath the weight of another, a sound close and watching. Swiftly, her ears pull back, her crown turns to face the assailant with molten silver writhing in the thick black ring of her stare, the pupil small and threatened in all the ways the other is invisible in its bed of black.

A sucked hiss ushers through her lips as the other speaks, gaze attuned to the darkness and finding the speaker a pale seraph in the shadowy boughs of the forest, blood staining her locks that tousle gently in the passing breeze that carries the scent of leaf bodies and the stream between them. Her nostrils draw, deeply, draconic in their slenderness, in their search for her identity, her purpose; for all the gore marking her pale bodice, there is no scent of the metallic ambrosia, not a sign that she wears the badges of war tied in her milky moon mane.

Curious, curious as the thousand eyes glinting and laughing behind her. She can hear the titter of the river and it makes her nervous as the stranger, rouses laughter supple and deranged to her lips once more to sing in time with the rise and ripple of the water, her eyes never leaving the beautiful stranger that spared her the stare of the stream.

She does not tremble, despite being startled, nor does she truly start; it is merely a twist of her hideously beautiful face, a bend of that supple and elegant neck to look upon the other woman awash in the orange light of the moon.

Who is she?

No one in this land knows what it good for them, do they?

The smile that breaks the impassive nothingness of her stare is cold and chipped from stone, snowy lashes flickering slowly over the maniacal gleam harbored in her face. "I could be a dream, sweet and fleeting," she sings, her head tilting with an exaggerated gesture to the right, almost as if her neck has been snapped there at the cheek and neck, limply hanging as the lips betray that she is not dead or broken at all, her laughter sweet and entwined with the childlike innocence of her voice, "a thought, a dancer like shores retreating."

She takes a step closer, to admire the perfection of that white pelt, the dark skin beneath. She smells like women and wilderness, like capsulated blood and a beating heart. Can she hear it, if she listens? Her ears cannot lean forward hard enough to glean if it is only the sound of her hooves that thuds so suddenly against the chiming rhythm of the starlit water behind her, trailing beacons on her ivory flesh. "Are you lonely, loveless?" she pauses as if a thought snatches her ankles fast, another inhalation deep and audible as it whistles through her nostrils suddenly, "Beloved will love you, though the water watches. It loves no one. It will not care."

@[Ophelia]

die like God, on the cover of time