The night is a glorious one, one that makes him thrill to be beside her. She is bold, being alone with him, for all that it meant she read the nobility of him even in the dark. His upbringing hadn’t been wasted, then, despite his leaving it behind. He is alive with the every movement, the very scent, of this mysterious woman. She asks him what he could want with all the world at his fingertips and his answer is not only brief but whole. Her. All he wants is her. All he needs is her. What boon would he ask of any god but to have her for his own? What other prayer need be said but that she and he be bound as one whole soul?
He speaks to her in their own tongue, calling her goddess, bidding she answer his prayer in the old gods stead. He tells her that even the old gods fall silent in her presence, drowned out by her beauty and her grace and his all-consuming desire for her. He tells her that she is the other portion of his soul, split at the dawning of memory so that they might have purpose in finding and uniting together again. She must know what he means, her entire body is singing to him in the most soft of melodies heard by the eyes and the nostrils.
Her breathing is hampered with restraint, her trembling body aches as he does for him to touch her, he knows now he is indeed not alone in this yearning, this temptation. She aches and he bids her with that last inch of distance between their breasts - let me free you from the pain of distance, let me catch you up with me in what comes after..
“ⲉⲱ̀ⲉϣⲱⲡⲓ, ⲡⲁϭⲟⲓⲥ.” she says in the tongue he had thought to never hear from her lips, and perhaps this should have been their warning - the tongue of the old gods on both their lips - but he does not hesitate to claim her, “ⲉⲱ̀ⲉϣⲱⲡⲓ, ⲧⲁϭⲟⲓⲥ.” His teeth mark first into her withers just above, gripped briefly into the last vestiges of her mane and flesh, and then the last of his resolve disintegrates.
- - - - - -
He wakes as she sleeps beside him, both their legs having given way to folding beneath them. He looks across the length of her body beside him and he presses his muzzle into the place he had laid his claim at her withers, careful not to disturb her peace. Even now, bodies well fed in one another, he cannot imagine having enough. He cannot imagine how he was to be kept from her even a single moment, to be parted even a breath seemed a cruel punishment.
The shudder that courses through him has nothing to do with the morning chill and everything to do with the taste of her hide on his tongue still. The flutter of his haunch-flesh is not because they have lain too long on the earth and entirely because her scent still calls to his very soul. A long night. A good night… but a night where he finds himself abashed at how much she had taken without even having known his name. He had fed her desires, had not resisted his, and here she lay bound to him and never to leave his side again - without a proper name for him, without knowing his True Name, without having spoken through the veil of a waterfall as she was washed for him and he for her by their chosen confidantes.
He had no regrets for claiming her, for their indulgences until too weary to even sleep on their feet, but now was a moment without the haze of desperate longing and now was the time to amend the things forgotten in the heat and fury of young passion. His neck cranes over her neck, his nicker cooing and as deep as whispered thunder. “Wahidat Jamilati, dhahab alsabah wa'ana matashawiq lisimae sutik.”
He strokes his neck overtop of hers before pulling himself to his feet and shaking the sand from himself haphazardly.
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