You are every inch of your homeland. You are made to ride dunes under the overbearing sun. You are made to look across a scorched earth and see beauty in the vast tracts of land between water sources.

Cyrra is at once slender, sinewy and rugged, made for the vast, dry, hot landscape to which she was born. She inherits a sort of stony, impossibly hearty constitution from her Layyah ancestors, writ across the tight coils of her muscles and the long distances she can trek without needing to stop for water. She is clean angles and slight curves, carefully put together and straight.

She was made in the sunfires of Solis’ forge, cast in iron molds of Leisha.

She is a pale, dulled red dun, her body a creamy-white with points of slightly ruddy-brown—lower legs, her face, darker around her muzzle, and the hem of her ears. Her forelegs are barred with primitive stripes. The broad, feathered wings that connect to strong, straight shoulders are similarly off-white. Her eyes are the bright blue of the endless day sky.

Around her neck, twisting and slithers from base of chest to a curl over her left ear, she wears a burnished, bronze serpentine neckpiece, a homage to her epithet, The Viper Slayer.

You are the dunes where the sun first touches at dawn. Bright and hard; cold, and them impossibly hot.

She once endeavoured to master her temper, that thing that exists in her like a spitting cobra, volatile and madly restive. She never truly succeeded, though it nestles around her heart with a maturity that makes it both better contained, and all the more venomous. Her umma once said it was imparted upon her by a viper’s bite, the one that had swollen up her leg and drew fevered sweats across her while body, necessitated restless prayers from her parent’s weary lips.

She is stone and iron, and she is the all the whispered memories, all the bedtime stories. All the hugs and giggles and fights and angry outbursts; the untold years spent going moonstruck in endless waking hell. She is a hulking, sun-hardened golem guarding a treasure of beautiful wildness and want.

She learned to love from a young age, and so while she is prideful and impassible—a scowl and a narrowed, haughty eye that screams, beware where you step—inside is softer. Inside is lustful and full, festal, if plied with time or alcohol; inside is a friend and a daughter and a lover.

So did she learn to be a soldier. Was pledged to a military life before she could even gurgle her first words; was an Arete before she knew the lovely and horrible architecture that would be built around that cynosure. Sometimes she resents it, sometimes she wishes to cast it off like a cloak and roam naked without it. Lighter. Easier. But it grasps her with hooks set too deep.

“You are thirst and thirst is all I know.
You are sand, wind, sun, and burning sky,
The hottest blue. You blow a breeze and brand
Your breath into my mouth.”

- Benjamin Alire Sáenz

☼

You are born, and born again, at the end of a blade—

Sage burns in the hearth by your mother’s side;
Fire splays strange, spectral shadows across the marble walls.
Your father has sent for the presence of a Layyahan Rayir;
             Spirits of the albarakin come to greet you.

You are born at the end of blade—

Your mother passes its honed edge across your damp forehead,
And then licks the blade clean.
Your blood is drawn for the first time.
             Welcome to the world, Cyrra.

Your parents are glorified in your arrival.
The Rayir tastes of your blood and says it is to.

             Solis blesses the day you are born,
             And also the day you are born again.

☼

You grow up in the gardens of Queen Marcisa Arisetta and in the red-cobbled streets of King Havieel’s Day Court. You are loved. But you are loved as by the sun and stone. Hard and disciplined. It makes your skin thick.

Lady Marcisa Arisetta calls you little Cyrra, and you like the way she says it; you call her Lady. Affectionately, you call your father, Ali Hassan, Big-Spear and he calls you Little-Wing. Your mother calls you my dearest nahra when she feeds and bathes you, you call her my beloved umma.

She sings you tribal songs and tells you Layyahan bedtime stories. She tells you about the albarakin, the great Layyahan warriors who have earned their place in aljuaa beside the mighty rays of Solis.

☼

You don’t mean to.

But when you get angry—(and you often do as a girl)—the golden sand around you and Zayir begins to shiver and rise to form a swirling cloud around you.

When you scream and stomp your hoof into the dune, it rushes forward as if caught by a gale that is not, like a thousand tiny spears commanded by your temper.

You tell Zayir you are so-so-so sorry as Big-Spear helps rinse his blood-shot eyes.

You feel bad.

You decide to master your emotions.

☼

You learn to rule the sand more effectively, to shield yourself, to harm others. You learn to draw metal across a stone to sharpen its killing edge. You learn to swing a scimitar, and you learn what it feels like to miss-swing.

What it feels like to carve the curve of your own fate into the air with iron.

☼

You kill a sandviper when you are just shy of a year old.

Mother calls you el’alafir-uquaa.

The Viper Slayer.

☼

You tell umma how much you love her. It is in her quarters, the rooms her and your father have shared all these years, that you allow yourself to cry. You tell her you don’t want to go, even if a part of you does.

She wipes the tears from your eyes.

Solterra is changing.

The crown is tilting.

You leave it behind.

You, Zayir, and your fathers, return to their homeland of Leisha, summoned to take up arms for their Lady’s family. War, bruise-black and blood-red, loom over it like an executioner’s axe. Trebuchets and other siege equipment line the banks of the great river Neilos like strange teeth, soldiers, like swart hoards. You observe them with a cool, subdued sort of terror. But terror isn’t the right word for it, is it?

It’s excitement. When fear mutates and takes on another’s skin.

Those that greet you are your people, too. They welcome you as brothers and sister, even in these grave hours.

The capitol of Inebu-Hedji extends itself to you.

You learn how to make moving golems in your rage. You learn how to touch, how to hurt and hurt back. You learn how to speak a foreign language and drink foreign wines. You learn what it’s like to celebrate victory, all spirits and skin. You learn a little bit about who you are.

And that there is so much left to learn.

You leave Leisha with a couple of faint scars and lessons like bruises on your skin.

☼

Lady Arisetta is dead.

Her grandson wears the crown of Solterra.

He wears it with indignity and with jealousy.

It sickens you.

☼

You fight a war for him!

You collect scars for him!

You command the sands for him!

Tyrant.

☼

Arjun tells you to meet in the courtyard. You do. You liked Arjun.

He tells you he and Zakariah have something to show everyone. Something that will… No. No, you do not remember what he tells you. You do not remember what he whispers in your ears, his lips against your skin, drawing a cruel smile onto your lips.

You remember, vaguely, your brothers and sisters following them down the streets of Solterra, to…

The image twists you inside. Anger and fear, sadness. That open maw, so like a set of void-jaws. You remember it felt cold as you descended, ducking down past the stone lip of the catacomb’s entrance. You remember it was dark, lit by the fires of your comrades and the lanterns your leader’s held aloft, splaying shifting candlelight across the bone walls.

You remember…

Dark.

☼

“Day two -

I cannot find Zayir. Saamir. Rashad. Falquan. Lisette.
I thought I heard one of them… crying? Or laughing?

Oh gods.

What the fuck is this place?”

---

“Day ten -

If I ever see Arjun again, I swear I’ll wear his fucking head like a helm!
I’ll carve out his eyes and bury them in the sand so that he may never gaze upon Solis again!

Bastard!
Bastard!
Bastard!”

---

“Day ilinaa el’ariiff -

I… I don’t have eyes anymore.

I don’t have a tongue.

W-where has my tongue gone?”

---

“Day ilinaa el’ariiff -

Stone talks with mouths like many fingertips.
Sand washes the soft cotton memories of babes.
The sun touches endless crystalline nests.

I’m thirsty.”

☼

You are born again at the end of a blade—

You swallow hard, the way your throat bulges against the rusted tip of the dagger as you do makes your guts squirm. It’s uncomfortable. It’s primal. The one who holds it, holds it with shaking mind’s grasp.

Blood trickles down your neck.

In the darkness, there is only you and them. They are shivering, their eyes are wide and wild. Their eyes are gone. You know what that feels like, you’d just never imagined what it looked liked.

“Step away,” you know you know this man. You know him. You know him. You knew him. No more. Like grains of sand down the glass curves of Time, slipping away until there’s nought, it is the hour of upheaval. It is the moment of rebirth. “Don’t do this…”

But he does. Because he is lost. He is gone.

You wrestle the blade from his grasp and thrust it into his eye until it meets the grind of bone and then you yank it out again. Blood spurts, hot and messy, across your chest. You let the blade fall to the ground, it clatters in the dark, the echo of it sickening.

             Welcome to the world, Cyrra.

You told him they called you The Viper Slayer. He told you he had a viper you could slay... it worked somehow.

You were young at the time.

Cyrra wears a twisted, slithering, serpentine neckpiece made of burnished bronze around her throat. It was made for her my smithy-jewellery maker in Leisha who took a liking to her and used the epithet the Viper Slayer in some very... affectionate and inventive ways.

Through it often reduces her mobility a bit, she wears it like a sigil of the venomous spirit that she is.

Cyrra also wears seven small, bronze rings in her mane, each holding a small bun in place.