for tonight I am the starving lion, tonight you are the bleeding lamb
He’s running, running, charging desperately through the sands with only the hope that today is not his last. Blood and sand mars his vision but and all he can hear is sand on scales and blood in veins but then there is a disruption, a pause, and a hiss. El Toro glances over his shoulder to see Seraphina hanging on to the beast for dear life. He turns on a dime, somehow, some way, sand flying behind him. It lifts from the ground to curl back towards the mare, momentarily slowed, jaws wide open in some accursed cry. Instead of climbing into the creature’s maw he slips under it - for all his bulk, he carries his mother’s bones and dancing form - and shoves his horn through its throat.
Blood spurts out and some ungodly noise peals out from the splitting airways; El Toro wrenches his head upwards and there is more blood than he has ever seen at once spraying from this great wound. He feels its muscles relax as death claims the wyrm for itself.
Oh no.
The bull feels its weight pressing down on his bloodied horn and it takes everything he has left to wriggle out of its gore and stumble onto the sand before the sandwyrm collapses (for it was never so far from the ground to begin with), a cloud of dust accompanying its demise. Toro’s chest heaves, blood dripping from his horns and sliding down his skull, but he looks for Seraphina, darting towards her when she is spotted - the adrenaline will keep the evening’s soreness away, if for but a moment - panting, ”Are you alright?”
when the fires are consuming you and your sacred stars won't be guiding you
Seraphina strained against the serpent, focusing all her attention on locking her jaws and holding her position; she was just beginning to slip when El Toro struck the beast, the serpent beginning to slip from her grasp, its great head turning, turning, turning as it writhed…and, in her mind’s eye, she could see it closed around her throat like a steel trap.
But then Toro was beneath the serpent, stabbing it in the throat with a great, sharp horn. The sandwyrm lets out a strangled hiss, flailing loosely, and pours gore out onto the sand in great, clumpy streams of violent red; Toro, coated in shades of red himself, only barely manages to scamper out from beneath the snake before it falls into the sand with a harsh slap and a spray of sand. He immediately ran to her, panting, and, with more concern than she had anticipated, asked, “Are you alright?”
She glanced at him, and then at the corpse of the dead sandwyrm, and dipped her head. “A few scratches – I’ll be fine,” she responded, a note of gratitude entering her tone. Seraphina was not at all accustomed to being asked if she is alright, even after a battle; the first time had been just before she had become Solterra’s Emissary, when Maxence called out for her when she was flung aside by the teryr, and she could remember each individual time it had happened since. A strange rarity, in a land so marked by violence, but a precious one, she thought. “What about you?” Her head tilted, eyes flickering across his blood-soaked frame; from what she could see, most of it seemed to have come from the sandwyrm.
It occurred to her, as her gaze darted momentarily to the dead serpent, that they – that he - had killed a sandwyrm; Seraphina decided that he was more impressive than she’d initially assumed. “You’re proper Solterran now, you know,” she said, a glint of something fierce and sharp – perhaps pride - in her strange eyes. (A ghostly hint of a smile played at the corner of her lips, barely perceptible.) “Killing a sandwyrm – that will certainly gain you a bit of respect in the capitol. Our people consider them sacred to Solis…hunting one is a great honor.” She nodded, casting her gaze out into the distance – towards the city. “Come on. I’ll take you back; best not to linger around a corpse in the Mors.”
She turns, a flash of slick silver gleaming with sweat, and begins the trek towards the capitol.
tags | @El Toro notes | sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss(ssssssssssss), but, like, in a dead way - anyways, finishing this up ;D they shall meet again very soon.
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
His concern for her mainly stemmed from the fact that she was his only way out, but, though he was loathe to admit it, battling and bonding were inextricably tied to his being, and he would have felt some bit of sadness (or disappointment, shame, what have you) had Seraphina perished between the sandwyrm’s jaws (or beneath its stomach, as he nearly had). At any rate, he was glad to see her alive and speaking. He took little notice of any emotion or gratitude in her voice; he was mostly thinking about how all this blood was going to smell in a few minutes and could he get a drink of water somewhere soon. He nodded breathlessly at her response, still shaken and battle-worn alike.
”What about you?”
”Fine. Yeah. Sticky.” A bath would be in order after he paraded his blood-soaked muscles around for a bit. It caught Toro off guard when she spoke again; mere moments ago he had been questioning that the land they lived in was even called Sol-terra and now he was a ”proper Solterran.” He looked back at the sandwyrm while she talked, the magnitude of his feat starting to sink in.
Not bad for a lost idiot in the desert, huh? He looked back to Seraphina and offered a tight smile. ”Solis. Right. An honor. Just glad it’s dead.” He nodded again and took a long, slow blink and one last glance at the monster before lurching into motion behind Seraphina.
