O.D. 6.17.2000 [1:08 p.m.]

(One of those rare Wish and Natalia ones...he's a Bagheera, she's Liz's BSD Ronin. Complicated, cool story.)

[Wish FireDancer]

Sat 02:42 CEST How long has it been? How far has she gone? This house--this once-core of spiraling insanity, of darkest, sweetest sin and late summer...delights--it is nothing but a house now, dry and empty in the slanting moonlight, abandoned, unknown. Scattered remnants of their torrential existence lie in darkened corners: torn silk, a few old bones, the tantalizing scent of--(Where are they? She left them here; she remembers them, half-grown creatures; she smells them still, damn it, and yet--and yet--?)

There is a rumbling in the air, subsonic, like the unheard trembling of the earth before the ocean rises and the mountains fall. Snarl? Purr? Somewhere in the shadows, seeing and almost unseen, the sketches of a sleek spine, a rounded head, massive paws, curled tail. He is still, the panther, the watcher from the night. His eyes see everything, follow her liquid, prowling gait, her wild-cast gaze.

[Natalia Reussione]

Sat 02:57 CEST The night is close - a stretch of darkness once-glorious now-suffocating. The night is close - is breathing hounding dark - is breath-stealing, superheated spiral and clawed.

The night is close - barbed - poisoned - storm. She is a wild thing, and cruel as the truth is cruel: the oldest truths, of slaughtered young and infertile soils, of sudden night-black terrors beneath the yawning yearn for all of this is(was) mine.

The night is close.

The night is closing...(In the waxen gray edges, liminal beneath the spill of ashen night - luminous - too bright - and fading at once - she sprawls, scuttles, crawls. Almost silver, almost golden, almost bronze - almost gleaming the heady slide of her skin upon the familiar comfort of luxury spilled like a wound in the night. Slowly-frantic, incomprehending, incomprehensible, she is a brilliant. She is a supernova.

How beautifully she will implode.

There is a breath - she draws a breath, a thieving gulp of the heavy night air, and savors the fading scent of -

who? Tension arches like water through the feral coil of her boneless spine, and between the blood-rich promise of parting lips is the ruthless flash of teeth.)

[Wish FireDancer]

Sat 03:11 CEST Tension--water--fluid--cat. How beautifully he rises from the darkness, such a slow, sensuously controlled movement, not a millimeter out of bounds. How beautifully he strides from the shadow, long, low pulls of muscle and sinew, thick with mysticism, blessed by the spirits of cat and Cahlash alike. Well does he knows his form--this form--and well, does he use it. How soft, the tread of his paw; how stark, the slant of the rising moon's kiss across his brow, silvering the tips of his fur, casting his stiff whiskers with a layer of thinnest sleet.

Does she snarl at him? Do those lush lips curl in disdain, threat? It is returned, a gesture as ritualistically dangerous as hers: a bare lifting of the black lip over white teeth, the flick of tongue (bloodstained?) from between those teeth. And he circles her, once, and again, his shoulderblades rolling beneath the oil-bright sleekness of black, black fur scattered with blacker still rosettes; his gaze as heavy--as velvet--as silent as his gait.

And slowly does that circle, that invisible ring diminish, until his rippling flanks brush her skin, until his steps slow to a walk, a stalk, a standstill, and he presses against her, some low tremor resounding still within, within. Beside her, behind her, his neck curves over her shoulder and his cheek slides along hers and his paw, one paw, raises, turns sideways, and curves--humanlike and so very cat at once--upon her hip.

[Natalia Reussione]

Sat 03:20 CEST She stills. She stills the way the heart stills between beats. She stills the way the lungs still between breaths. She stills - between - (...falls the shadow, stilling in the crawling tension of her shoulders, the snapping movement of her slender, swelling hips. She will cast him off. She will cast - all - off. She will burn. She will consume.) "...no..."

It is no sound. It is no-sound. It is deep below the realm of breath, it is threaded with the possibilities of thunder. What a bauble she is, gleaming, swelling, bursting in a slow frenzy of (stilling) glory.

She stills. How bends the night...? How bends the night to the curling cruelty of her hands - death-dealing, spider-spinning, murderous lovelies - oozing over the velvet-padded sleekness of his hip-dwelling paw. All stillness. All vacancy (...things fall apart. The center can/not...). Breathe. Listen to the surge between sound. (They are gone. I am beyond.) Dilation: the night...

...stills.

[Wish FireDancer]

Sat 03:30 CEST Dilation: the expansion of time, of his pupils, rounder, fuller, larger, out, out, until all that remains is the thinnest rim of green and silver, green-flecked silver (silver-flecked green?) around black, endless black, the night come to swallow her whole, enfold her in cat-soft paws, arms...silk and velvet...

...and steel. His paw flexes suddenly upon her hip; the curving dew-claw bites deep. He twists his head--she feels the slide of the tendons in his neck against her shoulder, and the rush of breath against her cheek an instant before there comes a sharp bloom of

(ecstasy)

pain, a magenta thunderhead, a silver needle penetrating the mind. His teeth close upon the ridge of her ear, snap shut, tender and merciless, draws blood. Bleed. Bleed it all out. Bleed clean.

Thus does he destroy her: as she destroys him. Thus does he remake her: as she remakes him. Through blood. Through pain. Burn and rise, rise and burn--dark phoenixes, Shiva. Lilith.

[Natalia Reussione]

Sat 03:43 CEST There is a still black core at the heart of chaos, and all kindnesses are ruthless, and all storms are centered, and wild, and wild, and centered (upon the swelling thunderhead of blood-blind-crimson-tooth-devour) there is nothing. There is no center and she falling endlessness against the swell of her (somehow too-) strong arms, her lethal thighs, her quicksilver comprehension of attack.

Salt. The sea is salt. Tidal the invasion, as inevitable as the moon. Swift-changing she spins within the circle of his predator's jaws, luminous and breaking with irridescent glories spent beneath the blindly rebirthing moon. No thought. No-thought in the pitted sweet-slow-dark hells of her swallowing gaze. No-thought in the mindless violence of weak, luminous arms unfurred against the sleek black power of the night's (un)holy hunter. Dull the human teeth, weak the human claws, bloodied the (in)human(ly lovely) arms, wild in the night. "...nominenoyou..."

Wild is the corrupted heart of the unfeeling night.

[Wish FireDancer]

Sat 03:58 CEST Her violence is neither resisted nor countered, but devoured: devoured, as she would devour him, and he, the world. Against the lashing storm of her (wild sensuality) hands he rears, throwing great clenching paws about her twisting shark-slippery form; upon her neck, her shoulder, his jaws open and shut, firmly, unshakeably, until somehow it is not the burn of teeth she feels but the burn of lip, of mouth. Until somehow it is not the unyielding restraint of claws unsheathed in warning that lies upon her skin but the masked violence of caress, desire. Until he is pulling her back, somehow, somewhere, somewhere, and beneath her his limbs are straight, his body unfurred, his hands lean and strong and--

--never quite human. Still, that spark leaps in his eyes; still, that darkness, that wildness, bleeds and throbs beneath his skin. Smoothly, he arcs up; his tongue catches the dwindling trail of blood from her skin--and, falling, dragging, pulling, he is the wordless attraction of the ocean's tides to the blazing, imploding silver shards of her moon.

His lips curl in a snarl that becomes a kiss, and his hand locks behind her neck, tumbles her down--goddess and slave both.

[Natalia Reussione]

Sat 04:12 CEST No... a jangled note casts the rich dark symphony into atonal chaos - attacking kiss kissing attack hissing sudden the flare of - "I will not" into the spiraling certainty of almost-breath.

Her hands his touch fire-spelled-fire-spilled rain onto the hungering expanse of her skin. The cruelest of moons refuse to shine, and vacancy fills the swell of the night. The frozen arch of hip, the lingering cruelty of breath, the breaking whip of her leaving, her absence, the vacuum where there was only heat.

She snarls. The vagaries of space. She is a sketch of a snarl, and all certainties are broken by the...

No. The edges of the smouldering even curl, paper-thin. The night is a husk, driven, pulsing, empty.