Zayir, who will never admit to having felt fear, fears the night. He fears the judgement of the cool stars and Caligo’s silver eye, too bright, always, whether it is winking or wide. The moon unnerves him and it bleaches from him the golden colour at the tips of his wings; bathed in moonlight, Zayir is silver and cold. 

That is how he stands: silver and cold. He is before the entrance of the catacombs with torches burning. It is here he gazes into the black abyss and the black abyss gazes back; it fill him with an unnamable, inescapable dread.

And yet that dread, attached to it, is a hollow kind of longing. It is the same ghostly sense of leaving a battle alive, of emerging intact and somehow whole. Once the tragedy, the violence, has touched you—you can never be untouched. But in that is a sort of elation. 

Zayir, having emerged from the catacombs, is a survivor. So why, then, does he stand so diligently each night? Why does he pray before the entrance each day, as Solis arcs across Solterra’s sandstone walls and then dips beyond the end of the world?

Tonight, Zayir stands watch. Tonight, Zayir tries not to fill the pull into the deep, the dark, that tells him, come back, come back an dream. 

He bites the inside of his cheek until it bleeds. He stamps his hoof; stretches his wings. And his mind turns on itself with a vibrant, sharp memory. Why are you here? he asks himself, and like a whip the reasoning comes.

”Son, where is Cyrra?”

Zorif—Zayir’s father, although he rarely thinks him of that, as anything besides sir, qayid alharb, Captain—asks the questions. Demands, in fact, the question. Zayir doesn’t know—they had been out in Elatus, practicing desert navigation. Zayir had thought it was a competition—he had thought they were meant to compete, to race, to see who was better.

“Zayir,” this time qayid alharb says it sharply. “Where is Cyrra?” 

“I—I… I don’t know. I thought it was a contest, qayid. I thought—“

“You thought? No, Zayir. Warriors—no, no, mere plebes… You don’t think, you follow. You listen, to what you are told.” Zorif did not often raise his voice, but he did now. The other stallions dark eyes, usually so stoic, so somber, came alight with an inner fire Zayir had never seen. “And the most important thing, in any exercise no matter how competitive… the most important thing is personnel accountability. No go out and find her. She is qiteat alruwh, a piece of soul. A comrade, forever—you do not lose her, you don’t compete to the point of putting yourselves in danger. To you, she is rafiq, she is companion. Now go. Don’t come back—never come back—until you find her.” 


The earthquake had awoken him, and several other Arete. But not enough. Nowhere near enough. He haunts the entrance of the catacombs waiting; hoping; praying.  The names of the missing are engraved in his mind as if he, himself, is their headstone. As if he, himself, is their monument. They seem to emerge more and more slowly or are found dead.

Halim. 

Abdul. 

Farrah.

Dina.

Rajiya. 
Sekhmet.

Nefertiti. 

Cyrra.

Cyrra. 

Cyrra?

It has become a nightly ritual as Zakariah’s curse is broken. Zayir hears the voice. He descends into the catacombs to answer the maddened call; already he has held the bleeding, decayed bodies of too many of his friends. Already their time in the catacombs has sent so many to madness and those who have emerged have done so touched, forever changed. He would be a liar if he were not relieved Cairo had already appeared; the man who—

And Zayir stops himself. 

There is one more whom his heart bleeds for. One more whom he must… he must know their fate. And it is with creeping apprehension that his journeys deeper, and deeper into the catacombs. From this distances the screams are disjointed; he cannot understand the maddened speech. When it stops, suddenly, Zayir is alarmed. He brandishes the torch forward, lighting the way, and begins to trot. 

What alarms him more is the telltale echo of a blade in the dark.

No, no, no. Had it been another suicide? Another manic, broken mind unable to come to terms with their reality? Lost to the eternity Zakariah had created? Arjun had led them into? 

“No, no, no.” It is a broken, strangled whisper at his lips. When he comes around a final bend and illuminates the darkness with the torch, Zayir is so shocked he drops it. 

The flame burns at his feet. Shadows dance across his chest and face and then the haunted express of the mare across from him.

Qiteat alruwh. 

Rafiq.

“Cyrra.” 

At her feet Halim lays dead, the dagger between them. It lay still trembling from the fall, and where it’s blade quivers it points towards Zayir. He watches the blood pool and thinks, 

Halim had always been of strong mind—how… how is it him? How is he dead? 

But the shock of Halim’s death is nothing compared to the sudden, welling hope in his chest. He says it tentatively, uncertain. The blade is bright in the torchlight. His eyes are drawn to it with fearful apprehension. Solis, no. From the distance, he could not tell if it were Cyrra’s manic voice or Halim’s. 

“Cyrra.” He repeats her name, speaking slowly. “It’s—it’s over. The curse, it’s been broken.” 

It’s ten years later. 

Nothing is the same. 

"Speaks" || @Cyrra

glory, glory, what a helluva way to die

glory, glory what a helluva way to die

”I…" her voice breaks the darkness as once’s face breaks the water at a baptism. "Gods, Z-Zayir… he—“

The silence that stretches after her comment takes on the shape of magnanimity, of absolutism, of something larger-than-life. It is the oppression of their condemnation; their imprisonment; their lost years. Zayir’s mouth is dry. He thinks of how he would like to be anywhere else; anywhere except this moment, where the feral look in her eyes expresses everything that writhes within himself. 

“I know.” And he does. He knows the madness; he has danced with it in this same dark tomb. He has laid in a crypt next to the creeping insanity of endless time; a death like life, or a life like death. He knows, as the blood pools wide enough around the corpse that it touches his ichor-gold hooves. Solis help us… Zayir… they’re all dead, aren’t they? He knows of whom she speaks; he had not allowed himself to grieve it until he had found her, dead or alive, and when she says it it is like a dam breaking. The floodwaters of grief rage in his heart; heavily, Zayir says, “Yes. They’re all dead.” 

I looked for you.

Zayir thinks, and I failed you. The thought does not emerge pragmatic, but swathed in rage. He wishes briefly, furiously, her blade had found him rather than Halim.

But he deserved a heavier sentence for allowing this to happen.

The only way to respond to her awakening is with hard facts, Zayir decides. It is the only way to keep his own emotions at bay, even as they circle, scenting the blood in the water. 

“I have only been awake for a few days… so far, it’s only myself, Hälla, Cairo and Sobec.” The names are dust on his lips; too dry. He finds, when he speaks them aloud rather than recounting them in memory, they are too few. They had been halfway to a regiment when they were entombed; enough of them to overthrow Zolin, had they been deft enough, had subservience not been instilled in them as fucking infants—

He clears his throat. The only way he can regard her in this place where he died is with apathy and clear eyes; he tries to remove himself, tries to quell the elations he is alive with the fact so many remain undiscovered. 

“We haven’t found them yet.” Zayir admits; he steps closer. They have never been a pair for intimate touches, for comradeship borne close; but Zayir now offers the brush of his shoulder, a strained gesture that suggests the tumultuous conflict he feels beneath. He would like to admit, But it doesn’t matter. It was me. It was my fault. I should have seen it— 

Doing so seems selfish in this dark moment. So Zayir does not. He holds his tongue and says instead, “But I suspect they were entombed with us. They were too powerful, and too hard to turn to pawns. Zolin would not have kept them alive. They are either dead or within the catacombs.” He looks beyond her shoulder to where the light of the torch does not reach. The flames are spitting on the dirt below and so Zayir reaches out with his telepathy to brandish the torch again. He feels the chill of millennium pressing up his spine; the ghosts not only of their war but countless wars before. He thinks of the crystal sarcophagus he dreamt, the runic inscriptions, caskets and mummies and beasts immortalised in gold and crystal. Those were all things he dreamt within the catacombs, and a creeping and sick curiosity arises in him. Were they real?

Instead of asking, he looks to Cyrra. He has positioned himself very intentionally, blocking the body of Halim from view. His voice is soft when he says, “Would you like me to lead you out?” Only those who know him well will be able to discern the way his voice is thick with tears unshed. 

"Speaks" || @Cyrra

down into the folly, you took my hand

past the thistle and the red elm