Moonsteel: Chapter 2a - A Moonlight Bond
The smell of powder, of night, of crystalized darkness exploding with the press of the trigger. Of rent earth.
Jol pivoted, spun. He was the wind, whirling, able to be as he pleased, anywhere he desired. His breath itself was the night air; the clouds formed from his lungs. The ebb and flow of the night was the rise and fall of his chest.
And his hand. Graceful, pure, refined. Smoothed by its collision with the air across the ages. Strong enough that it needed no muscle; beautiful enough that it needed no skin. He flexed, feeling the ages contract, hills of the past rising and spilling dark dirt from their torn knuckle seams, mountains of the future receding from the same wind that had polished his hand.
He chilled himself with his own breath; his skin prickled like the stars poking through the darkness above.
He wasn’t breathing. Misty was heavily. Their breath had mingled, was now pulling apart, tendrils of spun sugar dissolving into the night. The air was dry, a cold furnace. The gun beaded under the moonlight, rivers of water cutting through the rock of history, their confluence pounding into an ocean of violence that his skull managed to contain, but each heartbeat threatened to explode. Faint and wonderful, the tremor of the moon manifested in his hand. A slight shake of the barrel as he licked the drops of moisture from it. His tongue was quick, faster than ice could bond with metal.
A taste of eternity, and his mind settled. Misty was wide-eyed, deep double-plumes filling the space between them with every breath. She pawed at the earth, neighing. She bucked, the stirrups slapping wildly against her sweat-soaked skin. A whirlwind of her own, vying for his attention, hobbling back as he raised his gun hand to stroke her neck, rising on her haunches, batting at the gun with her razor hooves, at him.
Jol lowered his hand. He slid the barrel under his belt and felt the chill spread immediately. Letting go would be a mistake. The night needed him, his clarity, his speed.
Misty was wild, persistent, refusing to run. Rising and stomping, a cacophony of tack and supplies and primal fear. Of him. They locked eyes, calm between them for a single heartbeat, and he pulled the gun out to show her, his friend, to marvel at the beauty together.
She spun, hind legs of muscle, of every step of every journey compacted into a single taut spring of animal self-preservation, no longer wildly kicking, but focused, exact, lunging to rid him of his treasure.
The sheet of night was so still, so pure, that the kick was comically slow. Her hooves tore a ragged strip through the moonlight, pushed with animal fury into the moonlight plane. Jol would have laughed, but for the fact that Misty was trying to harm him. He moved as the moonlight did on its canvas, and the sucking and spray of Misty’s hooves tore through the night beside him.
It wasn’t the violence that holstered his weapon; it was the plea trapped within it, the limited shared vocabulary of their partnership. He let the gun sit against his skin, pressed there only by the weight of his belt. Jol drew deeply of the night, closed his eyes to trap it. And let go of the handle of the gun.