Doors Halloween (![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} doorsween) wrote in ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} doorslogs, |
Land, the genie could have told her, was like the sea itself. Wind brought low across the dunes and the sand spiraling like motes, like delicate glass particles, deadly if you walked into the center of the storm. People walked the roads between the dunes, the roads that were memories instead of concrete set beneath their feet with dreams of unctions and mystics in their heads, of lapis lazuli and silks thin enough to draw through the loop of a ring. Land was the gate shut tight on wide ocean vistas where the sky kissed the foam and blue everywhere in sight.
The eyes behind the veil were expressive, coffee-dark dislike of being called anything so offensive as a slip of a girl. “I’m a djinn,” she said with the sharp upward jerk of a chin stubborn beneath the soft wisp of pink stuff, “I’m not a girl at all. Not tonight. Not any night.” A pirate that sailed end to end and far beyond the lip of the map ought to know these things, the genie thought crossly, even if she had drowned where the light didn’t reach, where the bottom-feeders dredged in the silent dark. “And I meant the boat.” The boat was solid and it was wide, there was space on a salt-sprayed deck that couldn’t be found on striped silken cushions but it was metal and that was comforting for a genie who knew the enclosure of a lamp. “The boat is big. It’s huge!” It rocked beneath her feet and the genie lifted one and then the other until she hovered in the air very briefly. The silk at her ankles was damp now, and it clung to the rounded line of her calf.
“I know what’s coming,” the genie said, as she floated above the deck, unconcerned apparently with this state of affairs. “It’ll be the same thing. It’s always the same thing. But what’s behind no one ever looks at.”