Two Eyes Cenote nymph, then a virgin

whenever u have the chance!! <3

In the winding halls of Muat-Riya, in the dead of night where even the crickets no longer croon, the shoulders of a starved zealot brush against barren sandstone. The coronation of pharaoh is nigh. Her own promotion, too, leers; a growing pressure, a sudden swell of nerves.
'Round her shoulders lies the silver-woven skin of a bobcat. Her eyes, reddened, the kohl lining now ruddy and streaked across the hardlined structure of her cheeks. Her breath comes in billowing spirals of steam from between her lips. Shaky, uneven; she had been weeping.
She crouches, her muscles taut as she bends through the narrow tunnel that spreads into the flowering room. Tendrils hang above her head; below her, soft moss and blooms sheltered from the oncoming freeze of December.
While she did not entirely expect it, she hoped to cross paths with @Eset.

Bent over the limestone dais, Eset was lost to a thought that had bitten into her brain. It was an odd hour for work but there was an idea in her head that struck incessantly, needing to be freed. It involved framing the raised stone on either side in drapes of vine, thus leading the eye up into stars and where Khonsu’s waning moon would be be glistening on the night of the coronation.

She startles when approaching footfalls pass behind her, not anticipating any to be awake-

“Zaahira!" she gasps, then upon taking notice of the blur in the mazoi's orange gaze-

“Are you alright?”

Heart pounding, blood shimmering; her skin is alight, ears aflame with the all-encompassing rush. Eset.
Pacing herself, slowing. She pauses. The moonlight cascades over the sloping back of the servant girl, the commoner; there is power here, an imbalance that Zaahira had vowed to never take advantage of—
I would like you to kiss me. the pelt from her shoulders slumps to the floor. It is the only thing I will ever ask of you.

No words were spoken, nor did Eset look away from the mazoi, but merely froze where she was, huddle on the ground with a deafening strike of heart.

Slowly her eyes found the vines by her leg. They looked so trivial. They were just flowers. Just decoration.  She didn’t know when she’d leeched herself to the idea that they could mean more.

The fellahin does as ordered, first untwining herself then drawing forward. She looks into Zaahira’s tears before covering her mouth with her own. The solider would feel no resistance as she opened herself to her.

Indivisible from that which she was.

for a woman wrought with a hardlined stature, a woman so puritanical and stoic and prude, she is quick to crumble.
feverish, agonized, starved; inexperienced, gentle, perhaps too much so. a kiss for the dark-tinged lips, a nip to the soft warm skin below her eyelids. a rawboned brunette forelimb, held, caressed. the pelt, draped now over the bony shoulders of the fellahin; they are connected, even if it is fake, even if it is only for this dwindling moment.
in eset, zaahira sees no one else. she wished to see no one but her ever again.
believe me when i tell you that you are beautiful, habibti, she chokes on her own words, a soft, preening note crooned. you do not have to be good to be beautiful.
the most deadly of things often are.

Time tracks slowly, like sand trickling through an hour glass as she’s caressed. She can feel Zaahira’s hunger, how dire it makes her. She watches dazedly as her elbow is lifted and stroked. She's called beautiful. Words whispered for her are not cruel, they are gentle; she is gentle.  Sounds in the grotto magnify, kisses that tap like footsteps on stone-

Toula had said, the fellahin can back away. She finds her legs subservient, will not be moved.

“I,” Her breath quivers the air. She despises how it sounds.

Eset wanted to feel beautiful; she wanted to hear she was desired. But more-

“I want to own myself,” some imperceptible feeling arises in her chest.

i want to own myself.
when i become jodai, the warrior wets her lips with the swipe of a tongue, gaze feathersoft as her eyes hood with breathless desire. we could marry. you will not have to-- to touch me. you will not have to bear me children. it is not freedom, but, but you will be more than a servant.
mazoi rarely wed. jodai, even more uncommon. but she could not imagine their pharaoh-to-be denying it; denying this.
an even trade, zaahira thinks, as she tugs the hood of preyskin over eset's ears. she would have eset as her wife, even if only in court; eset would not have to feed anyone again.
i wish i could give you more than myself.

Jodai.

She recoils as if bitten by a temporal wind, cloak slipping from her withers into a pool at her paws, her exposed dark hackles trembling.

“I am not a wife- I am not a mother-” her eyes flare. "I do not need saving."

Zaahira wanted to be in control of her-

She realized then the grotto was the walled garden. Muat-Riya; Shuyet.

it shocked zaahira how swiftly her efforts had been crumbled and sent scattered in the wind. eset tears herself away so viscerally, so angrily, so —
the apologetic hurt rolls onto the mazoi's features in one swoop. eset, she wanted to reach for her, longed to, and yet she did not; could not, not again. eset had already done as she had asked, and she would will no more from her. that is not-- not at all what i had meant. her words come softly as salt yet again pours, scalding, from her eyes.
you do not have to be either of those things! i-i thought-- i do not know. i only wanted to offer you an easy out. you do not have to-- to love me, to ever return the affection i have for you. i only,
i only wish it were simpler.
i only wish you knew what it took for me to open myself to you.
crumbling, crumpling, zaahira's knees buckle as a torn, lonely cry shreds her vocal chords. please do not go.

She had not wanted out, she had wanted in-

Her mind works only in maddening slowness, submerged in Zaahira’s painful pleas. The fellahin falters forward, seeking to console her, as ingrained within her as breathing, to cease tears-

But she is just a girl again, questioning the merits of her own being. She cannot refuse jodai, yet her foot reaches again for a rearward step. This insubordination frightens her. She will pay for it. She needs to be gone before that can happen.

She courses through the halls, looking for one to turn into, fearing there are none. Then the threshold of Muat-Riya is within her sights and she blades beneath it.

if eset were to leave, zaahira would not chase. she owed her that. she had gotten what she wanted.
and now her blood sang with a burning regret. not for having done it, not for having known the way it felt to hold her and to taste her, but for this. for the fear that scorched the maidservant's face; for the empty thud of the pelt hitting the ground, for the way she now carried herself.
the one person she had never wished to inflict fear upon.

i am sorry.

she is not sure if she is heard.

She won’t outrun the break in Zaahira’s face. Won’t stop knowing she put it there- Eset’s mutilation- of Jodai. Disconnected from any sensation that is not shame.

She should go back- will it remit pain?

A fool would consign herself to the idea that clean floors and painted walls counted in the house of Gods. Even Hathor does not deign her existence in this desert, where the wolf has all to posses for themselves. But the wolf does not know- there is nothing anyone could get from her worth taking.

Would Zaahira bear to look at her again?

Come morning, she will track back the way she came; for Toula. She had to make it through the coronation and the wedding. She must.