Lion Head Mesa [m] forever in debt to your priceless advice

maybe @Akhtar? :eyes: takes place before the gwl invasion/soon after hira's arrival 

The landscape of Akashingo is different, one that requires getting used to for the warrior woman. The chambers of the underground will require mental mapping, and for now, she studies them; the intricacies of the murals, the soft lit beauty of the reddened earthen walls. She wonders if perhaps Selena would have liked it here.
She wonders many things. If the Dove has made plans with the tall man, if she will see her again. If Khaba has noticed her absence yet. Not that it matters much. Not that he would come looking. 
To him, she is but a pawn. A warm body, a quiet mouth. But slowly, she is realizing that she is more than that. The title of mazoi is one she will hold with pride, with diligence, with honor, with respect for the Queen who mercifully granted it to her. Toula's compassion is something that would not be taken lightly. 
But for now, she is quiet as she walks the hallway, a whirlwind of thoughts and feelings that go quiet as she admires her new home.

Visibly disheveled, the priest rose. He gave a few sleepy blinks, yawning aloud as he rose from his bed. He had come here to redecorate, but it would appear he had, instead, fallen into slumber.

It’s alright. He could decorate another time.

He stumbled to the door of his rooms, holding the air of a man stumbling about in a half open bathrobe. Of course, as he did, a woman would go wandering by.

Akhtar stared at her for a moment, before straightening with a small smile.

Good.. He paused. What time was it?

Good day!

Another thing Zaahira has learned: not all who walk Akashingo's halls are wolves. A man has approached her with a cool greeting, and admittedly, she does a double take when she sees him. Tall, very tall; slender, almost as if he were made of silk. Woven neatly from a spider's webbing with eyes that pierce her skin. 
With a tilt of her head and coy inflection, she asks: What are you?, and perhaps it would have been rude if not for the innocence behind it. Circling back towards him, she lowers her gait, pressing close with a nose that brushes up the side of his neck. He smells not of a wolf, though he almost resembles one. Perhaps a far-away species? You... wolf? 

The woman was wild, in the presence of her spirit to her dark eyes. Word raced quick through Akashingo’s spiderweb of gossip, and he quickly put a face on the word of a wild woman from the lake having come to Akashingo’s doors.

She doesn’t know what he is, but Akhtar was quite chuffed by that. He knew exactly how odd he was to see in this place, on his own with no long-limbed creature to accompany him.

Something like that. He hummed gently, allowing the woman her inspection of him.

I am a dog. I am to you as you are to a coyote. Different, but the same in some ways.

Dog? 
She repeats the word under her breath, drawn out and slow. D-ooooo-gggg, Blink, blink. Dog! Okay. 
Her curiosity is overwhelming as her eyes trace his rawboned figure. Feathery is his fur, soft and so unlike the pelt she wears herself. She is entertained greatly, a purr rumbling from her throat, a dance done in a little circle around him. Drawing back to his front, her nose presses to the corner of his slender jaw. Entranced, she was. 
Dog have name? She prods him with another question, head tilted as she creates an etching of space between them. I Zaahira. New here. 

Akhtar tipped his head to the side to allow for the touches, cool and confident in his authority in this space. After all, why risk biting him there when he did not invite it.

The priest smiled, lazy and lopsided.

It is Akhtar Mirzadeh, Priest of Toth. The fine silk of his tail swayed behind him, friendly, in a way.

Zaahira. He drawled out the a, and almost immediately started to regret it. Eugh, he was starting to sound like Ramesses’ diminutive jester, for all the man was a vizier now.

A very pretty name.

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A priest! Priest?
The serpent is beyond enthralled. Lost in a sea of warm brown, hooded and enticing. A feeling that had become so unknown to her over the passing weeks. Not since—
But she was no celibate. In fact, the perfect distraction lay right in front of her, unfurled and offering himself to her wanting hands. 
Head cocked to the side, lips pressed close to long, draping ears, she whispers; So you worship, yes? 

Akhtar felt as though he was in the coils of a great snake and oh, despite the hiss, he was enthralled as a mouse before a cobra.

His eyes were dark, melted chocolate, murky river water hiding a crocodile or shark from your view. He curved a salmon pink tongue from his jaws, coming up over his nose.

That I do.

Oh, hiss of Apophis, this woman was as dangerous as an asp. And yet Akhtar couldn’t help but stick his hand in and wait for her to bite.

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And that was all it took. 
With a serpentine grin, Zaahira's tongue flicks out from between her lips and presses to a ridged silver cheekbone. Worship me, then, Akhtar. 
And it's then that she snakes a willowed foreleg around his neck, claws digging just at the surface of skin. The longing of his gaze only drives her on, a fire at the base of her thighs. And if he accepts, she would lead him down a spiralling path to the chamber where she sleeps, where she would come alive again beneath him. 

Oh simple, simple Priest, the most cardinal sin that you cannot stay away from. 

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Worship, it’s what the women wanted. And who was Akhtar to deny them that? He was a weak willed man, after all, wasn’t that right?

The dig of claws into his holy skin just makes him grin, leaning into the touch enough to make them bruise, so that he’d wear her touch. For days if he had his way. The red woman who had enthralled him, this woman of delicious cinnamons just as the other. 

Oh how easily his devotion swayed.

If that is what you wish for, Zaahira. He was so quick to follow, knowing his duty just as he’d known a thousand others.

Or would you like to be called something else? Gilded collar about his neck, exotic pet showcased and pampered, Akhtar played his part with the grace of an opera singer making her debut.

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Whatever you see fits, is what she would say, and then she talks only in song. In secret moans that seep into the walls of her chamber, in the trophy the priest held in the form of scratches and her scent that surrounds him. Over and over she would bleed him dry and command him to praise her name; worship and pray to her on his knees, he would. 

***

When she is through with him, heat is dabbed from her forehead and she stays no closer to him than she has to. He has served his purpose to her.
And now; now, she is wrought with deep-cutting guilt that builds a wall between them. The chill of the air is in her bones, and as hard as she had tried to ignore them, the thoughts of her Raven are swarming her in a way that makes it hard to breathe. And as a result, she says nothing to him. 

She is quiet in the aftermath.

Akhtar is as well, but it is not the stony, shameful silence of the wild woman. It is the silence of the priest preening himself, sweeping the remnants of their coupling away with broad strokes of his tongue.

The clever priest did not know if his voice would be welcome, so he dared not open his jaws. Instead, he watched her out of the corner of his eye. Not as a lover might watch their partner with love in their eye, but as a wildcat might eye its competition, as a hawk watches the ground beneath its wings.

He twists his head, tucking it around the back of his neck to nibble at a stubborn knot in his silken hairs. Just a little more primping, and he would return to his life and leave the woman to her pain, mean as it might sound.

He wasn’t exactly the best person to come to for grief, for pain, priest or no priest. Akhtar had not been to confession in years by now.

last post from me!! thank you so much for the thread akhtar is a joy to read and write with <3333

There is no love here. 
And it is not so much the expectation of it from the priest as it is the longing. The betrayal she feels for having given her body to someone who is not Selena, the desire for the warm mouth of a woman of which she will never know again. The regret is endless, tiring; the shame is brutal. The distraction only fleeting and one that leaves her with a memory lit ablaze. 
And Akhtar is just as he had said he was. A dog. A man, or not quite. 
And so through glass eyes, she turns to him. Be well, Akhtar, is whispered, and quietly but urgently, she escorts him out. 

And once he is gone, she will slip from under the Queen's gaze, out through the tunnels and go to the nearby wellspring. And there, she would wash away Akhtar as much as she would the last traces of Selena. A necessary evil. 

And the last from me! Thank u for the excellent thread <33

She escorted him from her quarters, and he would oblige just as easily as he had followed her.

It would be back in his rooms, ensconced again on his throne of plentiful furs, that Akhtar would call a fellahin to him, request fermented fruit brought to him. He would settle on the furs, eat the fruits, but find there would be no rest for him, the buzz of the fruit unable to overtake the buzz of his mind.

And he would burn the midnight oil long into that night, rolling a pair of crude bone dice between his paws.