Prior to her entombment, it had been only very occasionally that Cyrra chose to leave Solterra for purposes besides war and duty. She had found her vices slaked perfectly fine in the walled city of sand and sun—she wanted for nothing. At least, wanted for nothing she felt she could have. It wasn’t in her to long for the unattainable—those messy and uncomfortable things were safely locked away beside the kernel of resentment she felt for living a life foretold, for never finding balance in it. 

For never opening herself up. 

She could throw off the yearning to explore, settle it deep in her breast, the frustration she felt for having married burden so perfectly to violent pursuits. She turned to training harder; to tempering herself like steel at a forge until what lay beyond the desert’s sill was a quaint fancy or a hoard of enemies. Whatever it needed to be for her. Until what branded her body was a sun-fire rage and a delight for destruction—and destruction comes in many forms.

Then came the disillusionment, the very systematic way it pulled her limb from limb and set her back together again in disorder. 

She had spent so much time with her own rapidly unravelling thoughts. Terribly alone, in a liminal space built for her punishment—for their punishment. And it had not come from an enemy, it had not come from Denocte, Terrastella, or Delumine. She had not been consigned to darkness by a foreign sorcerer—no, that would have been understandable. She could have accepted that. Not by an enemy, but by a friend, by a brother and by a crown she swore to. A knee she had bent, if a bit reluctantly. And so, when she surfaced, baptised once again by blood and sun, she had found herself unmoored from Solterra.

Distant, like drifting friends. The Arete were gone. Not just gone, forgotten—dried ink in historical tomes. She had Zayir. Cairo was alive. But their bond had been severed, poisoned by the treachery, and she struggled with putting the puzzle back together. It is a freedom, maybe even the freedom she had always wanted, but it came with its own messiness.

Halfway across Mors, she began to wonder why she hadn’t just stayed at The Duneworm Inn to drink at the bar with Ridouane and Bisar until the world became fuzzy and one or the other, or both, followed her upstairs. But, in truth, it had become choking. She felt the nearness of the catacombs like an unrelenting omen of something that could never truly be past. Something that would persist like a deep bruise on her skin, spun from darkness and dust and bone. 

She walked the streets and often found herself at the entrance as by trance, staring at it like staring the ferryman in the eye and if she lingered too long she was afraid she would follow him down…

So she flies and flies and flies away, until the tap-tap—like hooves against the insides of a sarcophagus—becomes too faint to hear. The rippling patterns of sand below fades to a rocky sill that gives itself away, in time, to grass and it is there that she lands. Buffeting the cooler air with her pale wings until her bronzed hooves touch down on the ground with an elegant slide that rips furrows in the yellowing grass. The Viper Slayer shakes them out and wraps herself in them; hard, blue eyes setting out across Eluetheria. Midday sun catches on the bronze serpentine around her neck and on the rings that hold the buns in her hair; bathes the sea of swaying vegetation of lemony light. 

There is a kind of uncomfortable quiet here, it sets her jaw in a tight clench, but after a still, unsure moment, she moves forward.

Sometimes, discomfort is good.

She could use a drink, though.

Vercingtorix

—

he sun does not matter upon their shoulders.

The changing season, too, seems irrelevant. The taste of winter is in the air. It occurs to him his birthday was this season; but earlier, when the leaves had just begun to change from vibrant greens to the brazen shades of decay. I am nine years old, he thinks, somewhat distantly, as Damascus flies overhead like a harbinger but high enough his size seems dismissible, at first.

This progression of time does not seem to matter.

Their march forward, toward Solterra, seems dizzyingly endless; they crest hill after hill of swaying, shoulder-high grass. Herds of buffalo roam, and Vercingtorix even sees elk run out of a forested pocket upon the plain before disappearing again.

This progression of time feels as if it belongs to another man entirely. The sun is a burden at their backs; it does little to pierce the cool air, until they near Solterra’s borders. It is only then that time begins to shift; that sand begins to shift through the hourglass, inevitably, with certainty, and yet—ticking, ticking, ticking.

Vercingtorix crests another, supple hill. The draw he has just abandoned may have masked his appearance, as it had the woman’s on the other side; he is utterly taken aback when he sees her, wading through the grass as he does. The jewellery catches Vercingtorix’s eyes first. He calls out a greeting to her “Good afternoon!” before loping in the pegasus’s direction.

Damascus, far above, tucks his wings and begins to descend. It does not take long for the dragon to near them; he hovers, momentarily, behind Vercingtorix. He beats his four wings to remain stationary in the air before landing with surprising suppleness for his size. Damascus does not yet approach; merely looms behind Torix.

“Are you coming from Solterra?” he asks, conversationally.

Whatever silence there had been, well.

It is gone now. Then: “I apologise for the melodrama of my companion.”

Damascus glowers.

§

i overcame myself, the sufferer;
i carried my own ashes to the mountains