She thought she had reached the nadir of her torment.

She thought she had breathed herself full of charnel air. So full, that the first clear inhale she had taken when she finally surfaced alongside Zayir had almost choked her, rejected as a saltwater fish does fresh. Had heard her fill of the faint tattoo of bony digits on old, cracked stone, like so many warpaths from the nether. Had breathed enough errant, wild whispers, like ghosts making home in jewelled, golden sarcophagi, that her voice had become the sole company she kept until it too died. Had paced herself so weary, that she had found respite and rest against the twists of pale bone and the thick wraps of linen that held preserved forms in chilling abeyance. Had wandered down labyrinthine halls of skulls and ribs and vertebrae, did so for so long, that it seemed to her the whole world must be made of skeletons. 

Even now, as she finds purchase on old, familiar ground, she mistakes loose rocks under her feet for the dusty, nauseating crunch of brittle bone and cringes.

(How could ten years feel like a lifetime?

Ten whole years.)

How could it still cling to her, that old stale air, the osseous redolence, the mummified darkness that held no end but instead an endless looping perdition? One step, she is bathed in radiant Solis’ heat, touching each militant, tight swarth of her misused body, coaxing life where there had been such settled lifelessness. And in the very next, she passes back into the far-beneath, cast like a damnable thing into an abyss of mortal, treacherous creation.

She thought she had reached the nadir, but as it turns out, the untangling is the worst part. The moment when she passes through the market and the smell of horsehair, cardamon, chilli and saffron suddenly cede to the stench of grime and subterranean torpor. She jerks her head around to find she is surrounded on all sides by customers, holding bundles of cinnamon sticks to be inspected and merchants, hawk curios from far-lands; by ruddy, sandstone walls and the harsh, white-hot sunlight that fills each crack and crevice contained. But, in the shadows that same sun casts, between walls and under awnings, shape the eyeless sockets and cryptic eternity of her hell.

She works, in restive, frantic ministrations to untie herself. To shake it loose like hair in the morning, and be free, yet.

Cyrra loses herself, now, in the lurching, red-stone of the canyon. She follows the winding, squeezing and opening paths, and they reek of her walking nightmare in the way they seem like a maze made to keep her alone forever. Except she knows, in her heart, that it’s not a maze but a challenge, and she knows the way to the top like the lines of her own bruised and aching knees. She has tread this quandary before. She has faced the dead ends and the dizzying confusion when you think you’ve lost your way. Because the sedimentary stone walls that rise on either side are so tall that you can no longer see the position of the sun, only a thin line of blue, cloudless sky. 

The Viper Slayer learned the way to the top by leaving white, chalked marks on the intersections and by racing Zayir, until the openings that lead upwards rather than ever onwards revealed themselves to her.

It is just past high noon when she heaves her body up, sweat slicks and froths along her pale groin and neck, her chest expands in rapid, gulping breaths. She could have flown. Of course she could have, but that had always been cheating. The easy way up. This had been a pilgrimage, and she stands now, a qajiid, forged in sun and labour. She sighs and stretches out her ecru wings, light limning the preened feathers, glinting off her damp form. Scorched earth splays out before her in its beauty of rolling dunes and hard, green succulents; the walled city of the Day Court; below it, the unsealed catacombs, being inspected by scholars as if it hadn’t been their misery for a decade prior.

And beyond that, somewhere, the Traitors bask in good Solis’ rays, like snakes.

Charnel abyss hints on the scarred stranger-woman, like slips of ghosts clinging to the wind-woven lengths of her hair. 

Even if she has forsaken them. Even if she has consigned them to a forgotten realm; a place of thick, sucking quicksand, swallowing deep into the guts of her being, the delicate and unlovely bones of her memory. In Cyrra’s arrogance and shared misery, The Viper Slayer thinks she can see it, see it all. Like a wreath of darkness slipping through the cracks around the stranger’s marred, militant form, flashing with tongues of endless, stygian halls and eyeless monuments. Those cracked and eroded marble iconography, eaten away at by time until their featureless faces could have been anyone. 

Any one of her brothers or sister; any one of her many vanquished foes, coming stone-alive to avenge the hilt-depth of scimitar in their stomach or throat. 

Her eyes narrow, brows knitting together in a hard, bitter recognition.

(You know her.

You also forget her.)

Cyrra shakes her head, watching with wary, severe blue eyes as the woman crosses the lurching rim of red stone, the precarious edge that they haunt with their memories—(with and without). She lets out a short, curt snort. A beware a stay back a who are you… Resigning to the idea that the sepulchral aura had simply been a figment of her own mind-prison, loosed demons of treachery, old as time and as arcane as whatever had come before.

☼

(You follow.

You were not a follower. Are not.

But you did, anyway. You followed the Alkhiana, in a formation of your Arete comrades—Zayir. Halim. Cairo…—each seduced into a tomb of your own keeping; a unique lie spun from his lips to your ears.

What had he told you? 

What had Arjun promised, with breath hot and slightly sour—and had you only known…)

☼

She breathes deep, the sun drying slick, piquant sweat on the twitching, aching coils of her body; she squares herself, pale wings held out to the sun, the scant breeze—baking and desiccant—dissipating the heat stored between the tidy rows of misused feathers.

Her heart begins to slow. Begins to find its rhythm from the sun-baked ground, up; from the unflappable, vast expanse of hateful, beautiful waste around them. She had never forgotten her kinship to the dunes. That, the decade of personal hell, had not taken from her, though it had worked restless to take everything else around it.

It is knit into her soul, so apart of her that to unfurl it would be to steal the crux of her very essence. Would be to leave her loveless, hateless, sexless, bloodless and insensate, a barbed husk.

‘Why.’

Her bronzed lip twitches, ears roving from alert prick to testing the edges of her wild mane, peeling back against the curl of bronze encircling the base of the left.

‘What in there could tempt you so much?’

Cyrra considers for a quiet, still, tense moment, the woman—known and unknown—and the question. But the answer is patently obvious to her; like the lines of her muzzle, how they match the boundary planes, telling the story of centuries. Millenia. Of God’s hands and mortal triumph. 

“Release.” The word is terse, iron around the edges, offered with no whimsy or cordiality, but with a promise and an offering and a tight, covetous grasp.

Her gaze wanders out, back across the desert as she contemplates whether or not it had worked as she had intended—as she had hoped. But this is a process, though she has never been patient, rather inclined to seek quick gratification. This cannot be undone in one harrowing climb, in one breathless kiss with the stark line between heaven and hell. 

“What up here did you hope you would find?” Her eyes return, narrowing, searching, appraising.

(You know her.)

☼  

(You can recall how it had happened, from your perspective, at least—

Which is that darkness had eaten them up, one by one. But not their voices. Those lingered like tattoos in the air; like bruises, growing at first more vibrant in the echoing dark and then… faint.

Faint and then, gone.

And you had called their names.

Zayir, above all—
Halim—
Cairo—
...—

But they never called back, because each of you were death, stranded in your own sarcophagus, a thousand leagues under the sand.)