#middleeasternmarketplace

Azzuri the Dancer in a Vibrant Marketplace

• Model: SeeDream

• Size: 1440 X 2560 (3.69 MP)

• Used settings:

  • Prompt: every appetite had its price, and every price its servant. There Azzuri walked, pale as moonlight spilled upon marble, a part of the tapestry yet apart from it: a pale thread in a cloth of bronze and shadow. He was young — not yet the weathered veteran of many winters — yet already stamped with the doom of his calling. In other lands lads of his age wore sword and mail and went forth to taste the first red heat of battle. Azzuri never knew such a fate. Slim he was, but not wasted. His limbs were lithe and curved like the dancer’s, not knotted with the blunt muscle of the spearman. There was a grace in the way his shoulders sloped and his ribs tightened, a catlike poise that belonged to one who moves to music and the measured weight of coin. He stood as tall as those who bore blades, but his shape read softer; to the cursory eye he might be mistaken for a girl — and in that mistake lay much of his market. What made him uncanny was the color of him. In the sun-streaked lanes where the bazaar people browned to many shades of tan and olive, Azzuri was nearly porcelain white. Not the pallor of death, but the delicate bloom of living marble — a skin that took the light like sifted milk and flushed faintly with pink. Upon that whiteness, in precise, unsettling places, blossomed rose-colored dots the size of a thumb. One shy dot above each eyebrow, like twin rubies set in a crown; three beneath each eye, placed as if by a jeweler’s hand; a scatter along the backs of his forearms; another fan of them across the lower curve of his belly. They were no disease, nor the markings of any tribe known to the caravans — they were birthmarks that read like a language, and men whispered that they were the mark of lovers or of cults. Whatever the truth, they made him remarkable, and in the market remarkable means profit. His face was androgynous and freshly wrought — high cheekbones that took blush like a woman, a small, thin nose, and lips like a painted petal. His smile was a practiced warmth, a coin-bright thing that welcomed and disarmed; yet his eyes bored with sorrow. Dark and deep, they were lined with kohl and shadowed by lashes like a courtesan’s. He painted his lids and wore pink that complimented the dots upon his skin; the effect was the artifice of the stage, made permanent. Gold hoops set in each pale ear swung when he moved, catching the lamplight and the eye. Upon his head lay a pompadour of white hair, full and puffy at the front, falling to a tousled nape as if a cloud had been pressed to the crown and left its imprint. Pale pink flecks marbled the tuft, soft as rose petals strewn on snow. The mass rose and billowed — absurd, boyish, coquettish — a crest that framed his face and made the pale skin seem less fragile, more deliberate. His dress proclaimed him denizen, not visitor, of the quarter. Around his hips a silk loincloth of pearl-pink clung, the front flap falling past his knees and swinging with each lithe step. At his ankles the six thin bracelets he wore on each leg chimed like a small wind, calling to the unquiet heart. His arms were swathed in diaphanous sleeves of white silk, almost wholly sheer, each bound twice with gold ribbons — once at wrist, once mid-bicep — leaving the shoulders and chest bare to the air and to the eyes. The garment left much to the imagination: feet and legs bared, belly taut and and pale, back and chest a study in tender flesh and scattered rose-dots.
  • Using base image: No
  • Aspect Ratio: portrait_tall