with her sweetened breath and her tongue so mean
she's the angel of small death and the codeine scene
The magic does not return quietly to all of them. Does not slip unnoticed like sleeping fog through a grey dusk. It does come like a whisper though, a sigh from a world that has been holding its breath for far too long, and when it brushes across the purple mares skin, she is awake at once. Her eyes narrow and darken from that pale lavender to something deep and rich and lurid, gleaming amethysts set heavily in an impossibly beautiful face. She rises without ceremony, that face carefully blank for a moment as she gathers those thick, feathered legs beneath her and then looks around with an expression of owed satisfaction.
It was back, the magic, she could feel the thrum of it, the thrill of it. Felt it splash through veins that were desert-dry and parched, felt it fill the fissures in her soul in the same way lightening filled the cracks of a sky.
For a long moment she is only still and only silent, though her eyes glint dark and eager, and there is a smile on those wicked lips that had not been there in a long while. There is so much to sift through, so many things that had turned to dust and slipped right on past while the world moved on without her. There was a time when she had known anything worth knowing, full histories and secrets and the intricate web of a very, very large family. But this magic had been gone longer than the Reckoning, gone for as long as she had been dead - well, mostly dead - and it felt withered and soft at the edges.
Still, it filled her, even soft and sleepy the power burned like trapped sunlight, left bruises on her bones and beneath her skin as it struggled to find its place inside her again. It pushed and she pushed back, released it in small purple sparks that popped and snapped against the gleaming smooth of amethyst and pearl skin. She reached for Woolf first, that wretched twin of hers, followed those familiar strands of silver to a flare of mulberry she recognized innately, wrapped those metaphorical fingers around it until he felt her there. His magic did not feel wild as hers did, was not formless and strange and new. It felt bound to him, woven into him as hers now tried to be and she knew at once that his had been restored even as she had gone without.
Her expression darkened, the furious purple of dark-bellied storm clouds as she released him from that magical hold and pushed him far to where he would not find her, to where he had chosen to be. They were meant to be bound, meant to be close, but he had not come for her and so she would not return to him now. In fact, she thought, and that smile softened dangerously, maybe this was for the best. It would be so much harder to stop her if he could not find her. Easier to drain him first, just a little. He’d be fine in the morning once he got those feathers unruffled.
She steps into the night and disappears, finding tears of magic in the planes around her that made it easier to slip from place to place unnoticed until she ended up in an old forest that seemed vaguely, and unimportantly, familiar. She had skirted many of the territories in her boredom, in the tedium that had become life without that magic in her veins. The trees were trees, tall and old and unremarkable, and she would have moved on (with the intention of exhausting Woolf’s magic) if not for the tug of something delicious that sharpened the eagerness in those curiously bright eyes. He tastes like winter, she can feel the bite of it on her tongue when she picks him out from the dark, like cold steel pressed to her lips.
Pop.
She disappears and reappears beside him, touches her mouth to his hip and his shoulder and the curve of a quivering neck as she completes a half-circle around him. Mine. The thought comes so easily, so reflexively as her lips part along his spine to taste the slush of unseasonal snow-melt. It was his magic that called to her, of course, the wildness of it coursing like a pulse beneath the soot and purple of his skin. But it was the wild in his eyes that made her smile, the heave of his chest and the sweat on his shoulders that had nothing to do with his abilities.
She forgets her boredom at once.
There is no apology in her face when she dives into his head, no hesitation when she finds not private moments or secrets (she has no need for those) but the image of a wolf prowling through the shadow of this forest. He has only a second of warning, if that wicked smile could be called a warning, before his limbs bend and break and he is what his wild aches to be. Admittedly, though she has never liked dogs very much, he is beautiful in this form. Sleek and dark and muscular, a sharp face with bright eyes that watch her in a way that makes her smile even wider. He doesn’t seem entirely pleased, and maybe she should have asked first, but there’s always a chance you’ll be told no if you give someone the option and Bright wasn’t all that fond of no.
So instead she steps forward, limbs shrinking and softening until she is his size and, mostly, his species. Her coat is deep purple and thick, especially around her neck, and when she pads to a stop and sits before him, a luxurious tail wraps itself across her paws. She is the deep purple of gems, iridescent and glowing, with sharp, luminous eyes that trap him curiously in place while she waits. “It looks better on me, you know.” She says eventually, languid and with a wolfish grin that makes her teeth flash like pearls. It is unclear whether she means the canid body or the shade of purple they share, but the intent is all the same as she rises and stretches, those sharp amethyst eyes glinting in the dark. “Don’t you agree?”
bright