Sheepeater Cliff [m] eighty-eighth

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The participants have indicated the following reason(s) for this warning: heavy suggestion, backdated to may 29th <3

the bleakened velveteen dark of early morning brought senmut awake, as if the complete absence of Ra here could not allow his soul to settle.

he was restless, and rose; but more than that he wanted to climb higher along the cliff. and so he stole along between somnolent bodies to rouse @Legend and whisper of his intentions.

he wanted a high place to offer prayers to the holy light when it poured across the mountains, and therein senmut would seek communion with the gods, to know if they should continue or turn back.

A whisper rose her from valleys of rest. Laid forth in her ears, a vision of the mountains spilled over with gods light.

Tired, with closed lids just barely unearthing her pupils behind their shelter. There, they touched over the features of Senmut's face in dark, and together they rose to follow up the overgrown paths. Racing the rise of the sun, so that it may be greeted by prayer in its awakening.

Her erpa-ha was flanked, the touch of his heavy steps met with the quiet trots of her legs hitting the ground. Deer-like, passing looks over top of his shoulder and eye-level often to his chest with a dipped head.

Even when she did not look to him, her head was pulled to the magnet of his throat and chin. He was a guide.

Legends voice was a whisper, and danced with a wonder that the lost did. "Does he know how to get to," her gaze looked forward to the peak, "top?"

"he does," senmut murmured, "but only if she helps him." her eyes had caressed him a half-dozen times while the hour was darkened, and now he wanted to see the splendor of her gaze as godlight fell across the land.

he took another ledge, and then another. the skies had changed to the first shade of dark grey and he knew he must focus upon climbing the cliffside.

for a time there was only the sound of their breath, their claws upon stone. and the large flat top of sheepeater soon loomed above them, spurring the pair on.

he let out a self-deprecating laugh when at long last they found the large expanse of rock.

Turning to him, the desert-dwellers smile tipped across her shady features. "Yes!"  She would see soon the wide oversight of the flatlands.

Where the tall leaves she had never found to cross paths with even her dreams displayed themselves below her like sand. Smooth-stepped, she climbed with him.

The imp swept through the crevices and uneven rockways. She'd slip silently, and then, oh, she would try again, daring a mountain as a dune. Those same efforts were what revealed a stable way to lead the prince.

The sky had begun its first stages of morph. Clouds rolled behind them in gray, and ahead was the clear view of the stars, and where the sun would birth.

"Look," she whispered so the gods did not disturb, and pattered to the flat edge with her hackles upon raise, eyes drawn into an ocean deep amusement. Dunes of trees, of valleys. Did he see?

he saw, he saw!

senmut scrambled up the last little promontory and out onto the true spread of grey stone over which the gentle lightening already lipped.

trees in rows and rows of bluest hue; senmut laughed aloud in surprise and wonder. "like a sea of lapis lazuli," he breathed to legend, "a jewel we can never capture, able to be held only by the cage of memory."

the stars slept, one by one, and he turned his pleased eyes upon legend, truly satisfied to share such a moment with her.

"Lapis!" She repeated, gasping it from her mouth and staring below to the mass of floral dunes.

Never this high, never once, never twice, no, not with the spawn of Osiris before them. With a turn of her inked face towards his chin, the woman's eyes looked quickly between Senmut, between the expanse.

"Tell," she asked, eager, "of the things He prays for. What he tells the Gods when Ra rises." Legend imagined many things. Why, the erpa-ha could speak in a myriad of words, voices and tongue, and though she had bowed to his feet, prayed to his prayer, she had never heard him in this way.

What worse thing than to not know, and now she wished to know. Senmut could show her. Again, the yaret asked, knowing well the gods very well heard her now as the god speakers ears faced her. "What does He tell them?"

he?

did legend speak of him, or the Golden One? but had he not once been a god before?

the righteous glow of amber began upon the horizon, and his voice lifted. this part was for a priestess to sing, senmut knew, but his clear tones carried the melodic prayer up toward the gilding sun.

he raised his arms into the air, the words a soft wash of gold dust.

and when he turned his face upon legend, his profile was lit by Ra, and senmut himself was reflected only as a red shadow of shimmer against the waking sun.

Senmut would not be a god without a goddess. Godlihood, an ascension too high for a demon of boiling hell-song and soul tattered keys, but if he was a god and she was his throne, should he sing as a priest in this moment, she would become his remade priestess.

Changeling, god. Changeling, God.

Red light encapsulated him as a god. God.

The devil was beautiful when she sang, fallen into the erpa-ha's eyes. A pirouette in voice did not dare overshadow the call of the divine. Prayer to prayer, wind drifted through the strand of each hair. In the dark of Senmut's silhouette and sun-bathed face, Legend could not take away her eyes from his as their shadows grew, and Ra burned their immortal skin.

Immortality fled her the brighter his emerald eyes shined, and the longer she could see through the maze of his pupils. A twist formed in the deep of her belly. Torn from her was her siren eyes, opening into a does while her heart raced a million suns ahead of her limbs. Senmut, seeing her, and then came again: what was this, if not seen?
What was this if not seen?

For a moment, Legend truly felt as if he bore through her soul just then and her breath was put to a stop. Senmut sang the most beautiful prayer.

her voice carried the resplendence of a thousand hymns, and he knew in the blood and bone of him that Ra was pleased by the raven. 

he wound the harmony around legend, over and again, and circled her with bold scarlet step as the song went on, as the spilling rush of light raced up their feet, their ankles, their chests.

priestess of a high cliff, his own altar built upon her belly.

his arms were strong around legend, suddenly, whispering the last words into the proud spire of one ear.

Worship was a feeble word with a mortal given and a holy demand. Who was worship given to, when the sun went into its goodnight and rose again with a fire unlike any other? Senmut was followed with eyes, and raced by with a damned heart, convulsing. A dared song with a flame that wished to then be snuffed by the strum of the priests voice so that her chest would silence. Make it silence! A spinning head with each circle, each lap and pace of body. Make it silence!

Chest, descending to the ground, and a cold breeze touching lengthy ears. If she was not supposed to bow, then why did Senmut command it so loudly in the ways he brought her heart to a rise? So violently?

Only a god.

A suffocated blaze by smooth water in the dawn, her waist was touched with warmth by red wrists. Embraced, sacred. Her throat was tight.

Only a god.

He casted her in a golden light no Ra had ever given.

Only a god.

Her voice searched in a vulnerability.

"Who do I pray to?"

Only a god.

can fade here! <3

"to the sun," senmut breathed out in a spiraling fire before he joined them beneath the clash of Ra's glow upon the stone.

it seemed pleasure eternal, the god's own flames filling the prince, erupting until he and legend were only one part of a single altar.

worship incarnate; the world burnt away; senmut caught his breath and felt the praise of legend and of Ra coalesce inside his flesh.

to the sun.

Ra had long laid his claim on their bodies by the time the raging heat in their bellies tamed down to a simmer.

Senmut's heart crackled into her ears. Back bound to the prince's chest against the warm ground, head leaned just enough into his red fur to keep the sound continuous. Birds sang a holy song after their prayer, and though the man's command had been to the sun, the sun was not the body given worship.

Seth could look down and seethe at her new God.

There was a fuzziness now. Fuzzy.. Where were they?

"...Sen-mut." There was no reason to whisper his name now, and there was not a single reason it was drawn out now other than the simple fact that she felt like it.

senmut melted into legend. she drew something from him, some essence of lightning fire and gems from beneath the world.

she whispered his name. he pulled her into heart's-beating contact, smoothing her languid arms. "legend," the prince murmured back into her satin ears, consumed and eagerly so.

Time ticked still.

However, time had always been still. 

A world not so cruel.

Of course, sex would always be numbing, but she found instead the many other avenues of resting in the prince's bed more appealing. The beat of hearts, the hold of arms, the break from the outer world, and the quiet fellahin who served in the place she had many times.

All of that, but now in the burning sun that cracked over them. Senmut should know she would repeat this reality for a lifetime and more just to break into that serenity again, that shelter.

"Do you hope for many children?" Nazli. "Fatherhood?" Unjudging, only..truly curious, and listening.

"long ago i learned what was to be mine and what was not. in acceptance, now i do not hope for children, legend. that life is not often for priests." his long arms settled more securely around her, his voice a caress; "do you?"

senmut could not give them and would not promise this, but he desired to know more of her ticking mind and its wants, more of her as they lay sated beneath Ra.

Sorry for the text wall!

"Really?"

And was there a time when he had? "Hopes. His has.. Changed?" Hopes could change in that way? It bewildered her and opened a door of many, many questions.

The gentle surprise that the woman held was hidden away by a stiffened ear. What other things were hoped for? What did priest life hold? What was an engraved yes and no? Could he hold no hopes, and no wants? The yaret held her tongue before she bombarded the priest with a million questions he'd struggle to keep up with, but they danced in her head. As in, the yaret tried to spare Senmut  hours of answering her. That same head had suddenly fallen into a tilt.

Do you?

Quiet, the mink tried to imagine then what that looked like. One, what answering a question of herself looked like, and how children would look like molded into her life. And what was her life? She didn't know if she'd be a good mother. What was a good mother? Was every woman with children a mother? What made a mother beyond birth? Legend didn't know if she knew how to do that.

"I don't.. Know." Blink.

Shifting to be more comfortable into the priest, both arms stretched and then fell back. Head, burying away into red fur. Senmut would have to watch her puzzle it out, and oh, the pieces were hard to click. Calm, still. Did she? "Don't know," both eyes squinted, and a realization was at the tip of the tongue before it was spoken, "how I am supposed..act. With children." There'd been no chance to learn before.

no worries at all! <3

he watched, he watched indeed, each interplay of emotion on the smooth face hewn from nightstone, on each flutter of her sun-washed lashes and the way her mouth too, took part in this contemplation.

"i do not think anyone knows, not innately. some come to learn it easily. for others it is difficult." his nails trailed the dip of a carved belly, resting, softening into stillness as he sought her eyes. "is that the only thing which stops you?"

suppose it ended her career; suppose her time as yaret came with a dictation. he could not exist beneath that and hoped that legend would never expect it of herself.

his smile now, Ra's light for her. "we should go back." and yet he did not stir.

And more big questions with big answers that should have come, yet the woman continued to stir an empty pot to rouse her mind. Long shifted and bended into comfort, now to instead lie in a puddle of thoughts that she did know if she knew how to swim in. It had never been a question before. She'd never been asked.

"I think," came out, and oh, she thought, but fell short to a more simple desire. One that could stay in the ascending light of the sun, and he who was Ra, and the godspeaker at her side. "It will be gods to create decisions for the life of mine, body of mine, and I will be happy. Happy.. with their use of My soul in their worlds, and their visions."

That was an answer that drew peace. There was nothing more blissful than to be controlled by a power above ones own and to know that your path had a beginning, an end, and choices you could make that would bring you anew into the universe. A mortal, owned. "That is walk of Life." She could burn in the flames of it.

"Theirs." 
And his.

And her body was a vessel to their lords, and that was a solace. In that way, nothing truly mattered. To do or not do.

Eyes buried away into the godspeakers arm, her heart beat steady. "Okay." But she too did not stir from place.

she was as much a willing altar as he, and it was to this connection which senmut had first been so drawn. legend was conduit for him while he was held transfixed by the gods; her worship was through him and into him, and he felt the word of their deities upon her mouth, as if he had formed their shapes.

he did not understand this between them, and perhaps he was not meant to comprehend.

his kiss was soft.

their hearts found a syncopation, a moment of it; he turned, inviting legend to his side on their reluctant winding descent back to the trading camp.