There's a hole in my heart that's bleeding
Noah’s warning look faded beneath her irreverence, replaced by something far more dangerous: a grin, visible even through maw and flame, in the crinkling of his glacier eyes. If she was going to be willfully impossible, then so be it. The sky could handle a little more spectacle. He took a deep breath. He climbed sharply, wings beating hard enough to send rolling currents through the air. Sila’s challenge was met with a delighted, answering rumble, and he spiraled upward with her, white feathers flashing against blue. At the apex of the turn he drew in another deep, powerful breath, heat building until it thrummed through his chest and along the base of his throat.
Then he let it go.
Fire erupted, not in a single plume but in a series of pulsing bursts, each timed with the beat of his wings. He snapped his head side to side, sending arcs of flame curling and crossing, sketching molten sigils across the open sky. One stream twisted into a corkscrew, another flared wide and flat like a burning banner, the two intersecting before dissolving into glittering embers that winked out long before they could fall.
A sound like laughter rolled from him, deep and unrestrained, the sheer joy of motion and power and heat spilling free. He dove, then pulled up hard, releasing a final blast that fanned out above him like a crown, backlighting his vast form in gold and white. For a heartbeat, he was a living constellation of fire and feather. Even in his joyful abandon, though, his control never wavered.
He leveled out near the Firecracker once more, wings spreading wide. The last wisps of smoke and heat drifted past the sails, warm but harmless, carrying with them the echo of his exhilaration, and he looked to the Honeybee with an expression that said: is tht all you've got?
Surely, she had more than arrows.
But its given me strength I needed to carry on
