Broken Prey

I was crouched upon a hilltop, watching the shades of silver moonlight ruffle the grasses down below when I spotted her. She was running, leaping at times over small gullies and bending into sudden rises in the uneven landscape. Words and pictures kept sliding off her skin, sloughed off as if the bloom of heat was being wisked away with the nighttime breeze. When the pale light dappled a finger over her, I could see that it was she that kept trying to remove the designs from her skin. Over and over she wiped at the ink, the dye, the paint, but each time new wording spread like a fire over fuel doused flesh.

He appeared from my left, following the same path of rises and falls as she, his strides longer, surer, eating the ground easily between them. Yet I could tell he was uncertain, hesitating. I could feel emotions, desire and loathing from Him, in a twisted conjunction of opposing forces. He would halt, and each time he did, she would stop as well, turning to wave him on. Beckoning with a smile that sparkled in the irridescent light. She could not see the turbulence that warred within him, nor did I think it would have stopped her if she had. He was trying to warn her that this was no lover's game, but she wiped away a string of half finished pictures from her chest and offered the canvas of her heart before flitting over the tips of the grass once more.

He was gaining on her, and I felt my throat tighten, constricting against words of warning, and cheers of encouragement. He was ten steps away, six, four....