CYRENE
mother, why do fireflies die so young?
T
empus spoke with the voice of millennium, of galaxies and infinite futures.Cyrene’s blood pulsed to the staccato beat of a long forgotten melody, her muscles drawn as tight as a bowstring. Amber eyes flashed like cut topaz, flitting from stone statue to grim gazes like a cat’s twitching tail.
As a child she’d never had much luck with settling, her heart running as wild as her curls. Even now — especially now — Cyrene shivered like a marionette with its strings on the verge of snapping.
One by one, the members of the regimes spoke. She did little else than listen as she ought to, her lips quirking with Bexley's fire, and stilling with Asterion's hurt. Seraphina was as stoic as her pelt was steel, and Aislinn (though they had never met, Dusk's regime seemed especially intertwined with the Rahilah warrior) as ferocious as the storm raging in her electric eyes.
Their voices were like vials poured into a witch’s turgid cauldron; each addition drew a puff of glittering smoke, a wave of bubbling froth, and Cyrene wondered, with morbid curiosity, if they knew how close it was to bursting.
She wondered, with mocking innocence, if one more vial would do it.
“If there is anything us mortals are good for,” she dared, amber eyes almost aflame, “it is change.” Cyrene’s smile, when she gave it, was a soft, furtive thing. It danced across the courts, lingering on none, not even her own. Her agitation, a prowling lion, was not directed at any of them. What Tempus spoke of... it was not about them. It was not for mere mortals to understand.
Change? Let it come. Her grin was potent as it beamed towards Tempus' stone likeness, rigid with blooming defiance. They were immortal. They could not die, would never die. The gods lived vicariously through their worshippers, dangled them all like squeaking mice to a round-bellied tiger.
When had their opinions ever mattered?
"speaks" | notes: angerry cy is here
