Cyrra gulps down the last of the mulled wine and lets the bronze cup clatter to the ground.

The world swims.

The world is warm and heady.

No. 

It’s cold. 

She curls into herself, folding over the newly cleaned straw of her bed in the inn she had taken up long-term residence in since awakening from the catacombs and being rescued from the stygian depths by Zayir. Downstairs, lute music trills under the overtones of The Duneworm Inn’s rambunctious patrons. Laughter and yelling; a festal, lively, seething sound that has been her lullaby for the past few weeks or so.

It soothes her. 

It reminds her she is not alone.

Except, up here, she is.

Up here she is all alone. And cold, though her body, from throat to knee, is held in the quietive hands of alcoholic reverie, rocking like mother’s hips in the womb to some semblance of sleep—the only reliable form of sleep she has found yet. (Umma and Big-Spear would be scandalized.). Her stark, swimming blue eyes flutter shut, lashes touching the high, august line of cheekbone, both nestling against the abrasive rub of straw. Her breath, spiced and slightly sour, becomes even in time. Deep and rhythmic as she marches like an intrepid pilgrim backwards. Or forwards. 

Or neither, for the dream-world has not longitude nor latitude, but is a place without limitation.

And yet… 

☉

The darkness is lit by the oily flames of soot-black braziers, spaced in long, even intervals. Enough, that the path ahead seems certain, but the margins around and between are full of the looming, growing dread of unknown. Unknown for some. Too familiar to her. She takes a stiff, militant step forward. The clack of her hoof on the old stone echoes. She squints up, but she cannot see the ceiling, for they are vaulted high, and though they are festooned with the images of Gods and souls in search of Gods—once painted but now flaking bare and dulled—nobody could possibly see the storied carvings in the pitch darkness.

The stale smell of that crypt’s foul air fills her nostrils, blots out any residual perfume of fermented fruit and horsehair. “Hell beacons, come,” she mutters, and the way the charnel silence eats her words makes her stomach lurch. The Viper Slayer gives her head a sharp shake and walks, the tips of her crackled hooves dragging along the dusty stone floor—tshhhh-clack, tshhhh-clack—as she begins her tireless shift.

(It feels like forever.

Another ten years went by, before you appear.)

Cyrra is not used to another in this place, and so, at first, she mistakes the form for another spectre haunting. She acknowledges it with narrowed eye and a curt snort, but then the world of her mind’s own making begins to crack and split at the seams around the visitor. She stops, her head held high, chin tucked towards her chest, in proud, guarded distrust. “How did you get here?” she demands, her voice is iron and venom, aching. 

Perhaps it is not the visitor who reveals the weaknesses in her mind-prison willingly, but by simply being, extends to Cyrra the possibility that this hell is not as real as it seems.

Perhaps, the visitor does not see it like this, but to Cyrra’s hard gaze, the faintest trace of sunlight halos the lucid stranger.

(You’ve dreamed this dream before.

You are always going backwards.

You are always stepping into a series of grave hallways that do not proceed, but revert, circulate; loop back on to each other, rucked and disobedient to any waking laws of physics or space.

You march. You patrol your ossuary, looking for the cracks in the illusion. 

But it isn’t an illusion. 

You are living it again. You are entombed until something—the screech of a hawk at hunt, a peel of laughter from the tavern below, a knock at the door from the keep, looking for the week’s deposit—wakes you, undoes the stitches of that arcane, devilish rune.

Except, you are always alone—)

☉

She eyes him with keen, hard suspicion.

Nobody has ever joined her here. She has called and called out, until her throat is raw and the taste of blood on her lips tells her she can call out no more. She has looked, searching for a single soul with breath and life and biology, just enough to let her know this place—this dream, this mimic-hell—lives. A moth, drawn to the oily braziers. A bat, hanging upon a curved and cracked piece of moulding. But silence always answers, with dry throat and swollen language, thick and incoherent. 

This place is sterile, salted earth. An untended garden, gone to seed.

So when he comes, limned in light, an answer to a timeless, desperate question, she wonders if he might not be another of Zakariah’s eidolons; a thing made of brutal betrayal and time-bending allurement. Her lips twitch and pull back from her teeth in a scowl, tail flicking in tense irritation against the cold, tight curves of her haunches, waiting for him—it—to answer for himself.

‘You left the door open.’

A low, warning grumbling spills from her bronze lips, eye narrowing. “Had someone only told me there was a door,” she breaths, sardonic and tired as she watches him take in the catacombs as they had been for her. As they had been for her, for a decade, punishment for flying too close to the sun. For reflecting fierce pride into the eyes of jealous contempt.

At least, that’s how she sees it.
Zolin and his cadre surely saw it otherwise.

Bastards all.

Cyrra snorts, a short, sharp exhale of breath, mordant and vaguely amused. The Viper Slayer takes a step forward, peering to her right down a hallway lined with bones and urns, the corner lit dimly with lamplight, but utter darkness prevails down the length until, perhaps twenty paces in, where another lit fire licks at the uninviting black, throwing spectral shadow puppets across the floor. 

“Most kind,” she considers the fork at which they stand, before turning her eyes back to him, to the strange, outside light that wreaths his form, her ears catching the question with distinct distraction. “I made a king pout,” she mutters—unable and frankly unwilling to hide the disdain spat into the last word—she shifts her weight, running her tongue across her dry lips.

Then, that light, that balefire, fades around him and her face falls, ears drooping to the side, corners of her lips coming to a frown. “Alqarf,” she sighs and picks up the resigned mien of her body, putting it back together in straight, uniform, militant posture. She looks him in the eyes, disappointment and annoyance colouring each word, “I thought you… knew the way out. Or… were the way out, or... something.” 

Cyrra shakes her head, and brushes past him, eyeing the corner, but continuing the way she had been going. That is, no way at all, really. “Keep up, I promise, there is nothing beyond me here.” 

She lifts her brows sardonically (or, is it wistfully—mercifully, he’ll never know for the way shadow mars the language of her facial features to gibberish) at the word Kings—

In many ways, she was moulded to be a kings-woman from birth. 

A guard and a tool—a weapon, extended; thrust and cutting. And so she did. And so she did time and time again. Whether it was her trusty scimitar shedding the stuffing a of training dummies in the Colosseum or piercing between the ribs of an enemy of Soleterra or Leisha. She thrust. And she cut. She loosed souls to the afterlife with light, elegant archs of sun-glistening bronze. And she did it under the banner of a King (and a Queen; especially a Queen) and that was meant, perhaps, to go on for eternity. To go on as long as the kingsline bled into its bloated and gilt river of eminence.

Until there came a king unworthy of it.

Until there came a king, too jealous of their—

They had flown too close to the sun, you see. Touched a god and were found unworthy of it. Were found too lowly to bask in that comfort and divinity; too mortal and far too delicate for that kind of heat. Were held like paragons against the sandy breast of a sun-realm—or so they were told—but were flesh and blood and bone. And mind, too prone to trust and too wanting of their own reprisals. It meant something different to each of them, but each of them thought they had found what they needed to hear on the Traitor’s tongue and look where it had got them.

Look where it had got them.

’Was it worth it?’ She chews her lip, eyes searching methodically in the darkness for that which she knows is not there—a way out; her brothers and sisters in arms; Zayir; Big-Spear and Umma; release; death, life—a strange pantomime, for even she knows that this is a dream. A fleeting thing, a twisted and perverse flight of fancy. She has to wonder what her subconscious is hoping to get out of this charade. Was it closure? Was it understanding? She understood it perfectly well. “Worth it? Hmph. I regret almost everything about what landed me in this hell,” she mutters, low and bitter—words not meant to be said, but kept. “But I never miss a chance for the enemy to show its face.” And show its face it had.

Faces.

Bastards.

So, indeed, they march on in the unhallow and stagnant—deathly, sickly, nauseatingly stagnant—halls of her very own mind-prison! See here, the bones that festoon the dusty corners of this stone mausoleum. There, the urns that hold the ashes of some thousand-year-old-forgotten. A gawping, abeyant—somewhat-equine, more or less—figure, wrapped tightly in yellowed linen and smelling of something deeply unpleasant and alchemical. A crystalline sarcophagus upon a stone plinth; gilt and jewelled and it matters not what kind of pull the dead inside once had, for nobody gives a rat’s shit about them anymore. 

Speaking of rats—there are none.

Small mercies.

She listens, and breaths a stifled and secret sigh of relief when he finally follows. Traitorous chimaera or no, he’s better company than her own thoughts. And besides, she knows how this story arch goes:


First, she is here. Just is. What comes before is far-away and irrelevant to what comes next;

Then, she screams. She screams for her Arete comrades. She screams for Zayir. She screams for her mother and father. She screams in pain and anger and those throes go on for days.

And then, she becomes silent, because nothing answers back but the corrupt reverb of her own voice. And besides, her throat begins to ache.

Then, she searches. She marches. She patrols, endlessly, through these labyrinthine halls until she thinks she finally remembers her way around—

And then, she mind begins to unravel. She is thirsty. Her voice feels like purple claws in her mouth. Her brain is like carnation-red silk, soft and sanguine. Her feet leave tattoos of holy-women, bare-breasted and semi-alive on the pearly floor.

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

The last chapter is the real damnation.

When he offers his challenge, she huffs irritably under her breath, a tone that says, ‘face it, we have been consigned to darkness—get comfortable’ but she supposes it costs her nothing to play along. Her eyes waver to the glints of dull gold and bronze that the firelight catches—urns and tithes—losing their characteristic focus. Is it the bight of the Oasis, where her and Zayir played and argued? The gardens of Lady Arisetta, where she tumbled and bruised her knees as a girl (Umma would kiss the scrapes and tell her to harden up in the same breath)? Those all seemed too personal. Too close. So instead, she fishes for memories of her young adulthood, spent abroad.

The world around her seems stiff. Resistant. It rebels against her brain, growing darker, fires sputtering and hissing clear consternation—but along the stale air comes the faintest whiff of jasmine and pomegranate; ale and wine. Her brows knit together as she turns a corner, instinctively, though she cannot, on thinking back, recall if that passageway has ever been there before... 

She glances back at Dune, eyeing the make and measure of him, like a general would their rows upon rows of soldiers. In time, she snorts softly and dispenses with the reticence, “You do not feel like anything I would come up with,” her deep, hard eyes narrow for a second, examining the curves and valleys of him, of this lucid walker. She tries to picture some man or woman she might have bedded, or killed; someone she may have run into on the streets. Something to elicit such a powerful and life-like reimagining. 

But he does not ring a bell. 

“I cannot imagine you would want to be in here with me so. Grave mistake, was it?” They wander on, but as they do, the redolence of some far-away kingdom grows stronger, and in the echoing halls of her dreams, the sound of chatter and laughter and clinking earthware hum like ghosts.

She had done everything in her power to barter with the misery, to eke out from life what pleasures she could between the bloodshed and the raw moments afterwards… those hot, sticky, coppery moments; coalesced into one faceless thing, donned in a hundred pairs of insensate eyes and hundred blue tongues, lolling. If one can imagine: Everything surrounding seems to quiet, to disappear into a shapeless whirl of life beyond the sill at which she stands, marvelling at, and sickened by, the pantomime of godhood. That’s what taking a life is, really, at the end of the day, isn’t it? To mime the ordained power of the divine ‒ to wield the purloined scales of judgement and finality, so uncouth in mortal hands. 

She hadn’t made peace with any of it, but she had found small ways to make it all go away, and if that’s the closest she ever comes to absolution, to freedom, so be it.

Nor, indeed, is she meant to be forgiven ‒ not meant to be pitied in the quiet way that he does now, taking in the enormity of that ill-begotten punishment ‒ she may not have earned this cryptic existence… but then again, maybe she had, in a way, for sins gone unpaid. It had simply been a happy coincidence. Long Like the King.

Not that she believes any of that. Those dizzying height of self-awareness exists in the centre of her labyrinthian arrogance and anger, glowing softly as a holy grail might, far too pleased with itself. No. It had not been more than pouting ‒ not from her perspective ‒ at least, not as far as Zolin goes, and if she could have, she would have stood at the margin of life and death with him and revelled as she played numen of carnage once again.

She really only has herself to blame. Not that she would say otherwise. That level of self-awareness is perfectly accessible..

He’s right, though, life is about suffering between the small mercies.

He’s right, too, that it’s a bloody grim train of thought.

As they walk, the world becomes a little less dark, a little less stagnant ‒ so gradually, that it is almost imperceptible, except that nothing in that choking underworld can ever go wholly unnoticed. The way the dream mutates does not feel like a shift to her, but a phase ‒ like night bleeding into dusk. She sees it, recognizes it with a cocked head, but the exact moment things begin to unweave she cannot quite put her finger on. Perhaps the lucid walker experiences otherwise, her mind holding onto him in unsteady, increasingly suspicious hands. 

But the sputtering braziers throw less splaying flamelight, and a more consistent ambience basks the intricate details of the ceiling into sight. They are engraved with images of life and death; gods and mortals. Now and then, a beam of wood, so out of place in the necropolis, spans wall-to-wall.

The passage-that-was-never, too, becomes wider, and the darkened rooms that split off from it are filled with heaps of vaguely equine shapes, dented, dull helms rolling down them with sharp clattering. Strange flags wave windlessly at the precipices, piercing through the bodies like claimed earth. These tableaus in-between, she offers only cursory, vapid glance, a look that says, not this again, and nothing more.

The walker cackles and Cyrra turns her sharp gaze on him, brow cocked. It echoes, inelegant and unwanted in this place, but where it lands, it seems to burn holes in the fabric of the dream, pinpoints of sunlight slanting through, elaborating motes of dust. Dune, from the low quarter, the Viper Slayer plays with anger, annoyance, and interest, in equal measure. She would never admit it ‒ like he rebukes his joy in being noticed‒  but she receives his presence gladly. As gladly as she can. So that he is here at all, somehow, is immaterial; the how is what sticks like a thorn. “Dune, from the low quarter,” the mockery he waits for never comes ‒ it has never meant much to her, which is rich coming from someone who grew up in the Queen’s gardens; but an Arete had always been an Arete, no matter their origins. “Cyrra.”

The sound of voices grows louder ‒ the clinking of mugs, the sound of oud strings and tabla percussion. Cyrra seems not to notice at all, her ears turned back to him, grunting, “accident. Minor difference, from my perspective.” The words lack enough venom to be dangerous but are hard enough to be chastizing.

Her mind has always been a guarded palace.

“How do you you opps into someone elses’ mind?”

It is, after some moments walking, that they ‒ dreamer and walker ‒ come to a door, light limning the cracks around its frame. She considers it ‒ the intricate girih patterns etched in the wood, the brass handle, shaped like a hooding snake. ‘So do you always wear a collar, or-’ Cheeky. Her lip twitches, pulse quickening in her ears. “Al Miqyas Aldhahab,” Had he not challenged her? This is what she came come up with? 

Well, it’s no flight through the cosmos, but, ce la vie. 

She moves to press her nose against the door and it opens at the slightest brush. The light that streams in is blinding, like stepping out at first sun-up, but Cyrra moves into it greedily, the dry warmth of that place like a lover’s touch. “It’s not a collar,” she blinks, slowly letting the scene emerge from the wash of white. A tavern, with brightly coloured, geometric patterns on the walls; vibrant, aromatic smoke curls up to the wooden beams above from circles of huddled heads and the air smells like wine, ale, jasmine blooms and spice. 

“...it’s a… long story…”

She smirks. 

Somewhere, beneath the din of laughter and conversation, two, slightly slurred, coquettish voices surface, rippled versions of themselves ‒ ‘they call me the Viper Slayer, where I come from...’

‘...oh, aye? Well... I have a Viper needs Slaying…’

It isn’t a long story, at all, actually. It is an interminably embarrassing one. “I met a metalworker in this place. He made it for me.” She turns her head, craning over the patrons with their fluted, golden cups and elaborate, flowing cloaks, to where she knows she should be sitting, flushed and too close to the hale Leishan. But there is only an inchoate shade, like an imprinted presence. “Do you drink in dreams?” she turns to him, “If you don’t, this is a good place to start.” She doesn’t bother to ask him if he can drink here at all, or if those kinds of pleasures are denied a walker. She can, she’s dreamed of wine many-a nights.

She mutters something to a server passing by in a lilting, melodic tongue. The pretty girl with kohl-lined eyes nods her head and sways away, the golden coins that hem her scarf jingling. She returns with two cups. Cyrra takes one in her mind’s grasp and raises it, before bringing it to her lips, “to your health, Dune.” The other sits expectantly on its tray.

The pretty girl with kohl-lined eyes winks.