When those fruit hiss and sigh and beat hot against your hand you know it's time to jump back, know the tree might split into flame any second - but I've never been one to resist their sweetness.

Buckling back into woman-shape was an old ache, but seeing her in human skin, burnished like the copper moon, was a new one; I knew I'd do anything - would forget Diana and worship her - if she asked.


Edited at 2012-11-28 04:45 pm (UTC)

She boiled the world softly on her tongue: a glaze of rich sweetness, jewelled cities crisping, caramelising, then brittle earth and the velvety marrow of blood-soaked foundations, and layers of never-before, never-again tasted continent-roots; she belched fire, and the sour aftertaste of empires.

'Are we spider-gods, girl?' chided Autumn. 'Are villages flies? We don't wrap cobwebs around them whole."

They took the boat up early and high, to wait for the pinks and plums and gold-puffed cirrocumuli, whose pelts of burning light would make the finest thread.

Her teeth, when she smiled, were stained ember-orange; her voice, when she whispered, was rank with salt and clove: "I know where the last ones grow."

A stair where the scuffed wood was stained plum-brown, a pale ribbon that was always tied around a different baluster, a smile-shaped notch in the banister: did these things belong to the staircase, or were they left by a previous victim?

'You became a recluse after that, leaving everyone to work out the world for themselves - why?' said the interviewer, smiling sharkishly over his cup of perfumed sand.

'I didn't want to know what the critics were saying.'