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His glacial eyes bore into her, deeper than the ocean on a night without stars. Nekharat met his steady gaze with her own, glittering like embers in the moonlight. She poured over him; the steady slope of his shoulders gave way to a muscular midsection that flowed seamlessly into defined haunches of stoney-cream, shaped by sand-laden winds and sweltering heat. The urge to launch toward him overcame her, and without so much as a word between them they exchanged blows, sculptors with chisels and a similar vision. They twisted, snapped their teeth and drove their hooves in tandem. Some blows struck skin, some met only air, but all were as intentional and deliberately placed as in a work of art. And when it was done, they threw down their tools and she disappeared from sight—too soon to look upon her work without scorn.
Nekharat came to stillness once again at the top of a small hill. Her nostrils flared, riled from the exertion as her eyes stayed fixed upon the mountain in the distance—the Peak that she had come to call home. She wondered how many years it had taken for it to reach such heights, how many slammed their hooves into its stone and rock and shaped its surface into the towering symbol of force and prevailing greatness it had become. She was privileged to have found her way to it, pulled by an unconscious magnetism deep in her bones and carried by blood to her heart that pounded in her chest like a drum.
She had not wished to become entangled in anything besides the web of righteousness she was weaving, but he—the marble stallion with ice in his eyes—entranced her. The fire-red mare could not resist her heat against his coolness, and like fire in a kiln, she was overcome with a burning desire to shape him into something permanent, like the mountain.
His words came dripping from his mouth in their shared language, and she snapped her nose over her shoulder to find him standing before her again.
“Nekharat,” she said sharply but without venom, the consonants flicking hard on her tongue. He drifted steadily closer, falsely demure as he teased her with feigned indifference. She had a mind to rush him again, to continue the work she had impulsively started, but she did not. After all, they already knew too much about each other, having felt their bodies clash and the resulting contact reverberate just under their skin like the sound of fading thunder.
“Öyle mi”, she quirked dryly, choosing to keep the conversation about him. “And did you believe them?”
NEKHARAT
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