Noam follows the sound of music, the bark of laughter that coalesce from the palace. The heavy scent of beer and spices that begin to accumulate, assaults his sense of smell. The taste of equine lays thick in the air, heavy and crude – it feeds into the nausea that sticks behind his throat.
Reminds the stallion of iron and copper, of the earth.
He knows not why he follows the tail of the flute, or the cadence of the drums. Or why the light irritates his eyes when the sun has fallen several hours ago. The streets are filled with foreigners, just as much as they are overflowing with citizens. But there is a calling that brings him closer to the castle’s gates. A phantom touch, that places an unusual, gentle nudge forwards.
The air remains heady and energized with a familiar fervor within. Fills him with adrenaline, for an enemy he cannot see – and shadows that mean to do more, than bite his ankles or pull his hair. He mistakes his beating heart for the drums that ground the music. Takes refuge beside a column and leans a shoulder against the cool brick.
He can focus on their movements at least. The dancers, as they sprawl across the floor ahead. They smile, others grin while a few are entirely lost in the motions. Some fumble, while the practiced dancers contest with each other – and in a flurry of motions, be it grace or raw ineptness – they are elevated to a higher place. Is it joy that shines past their eyes? Or is it merely a result of adrenaline, the physical labors pressed against each other that results? There are pairs who delve into some other world, where their breath consumes one another, and their limbs entangle in a coordinated embrace. Not unlike the entanglement of soldiers, seeking purchase of flesh and the draw of blood. There was rhythm to the chaos – if one could fathom the technique, the game.
The sparrow steals himself away before he can catch any lingering eyes. Avoids being drawn in, for the creeping fear he might lose his footing – and reach for a dagger instead of a hand.
There is something wrong with these halls. With the jovial nature of the festival, and the foreigners that bloat the streets; the wears and trinkets that are traded or purchased. Some might have called it progress, a steppingstone into Solterra’s future. Noam did not have a name for it yet.
He passed by a stand and grabbed blindly for an ale. An arched opening led out to the starlit sky, offering a way out of the stifling cage behind. Noam pressed his chest up against the barrier of the stone lookout. The sparrow’s eyes sharp, as they regarded the various lights flickering in the distance. Hints of where the other parts of the castle led further on. Perhaps a barracks of rotating men and women, just as blind, just as deeply invested in the sands and the stifling heat of the summer.
Did they revel in their king? Did they adore him, too?
Were there secrets still – chaining men to their ideologies, and keeping children silent by the whip.
ooc// open to any. =P
06-13-2020, 12:42 AM - This post was last modified: 06-18-2020, 12:38 AM by Noam
You wrap your name tight around my ribs
And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
She wakes up in a cold sweat—
She feels pressed down upon on all sides.
She feels enormously small, if such a thing can be felt. Picked apart, skinned, cleaned out and emptied. Remade with sepulchral hands. She is filled with stagnant, old charnel air; the dust of wasting bones; the thin, dried slips of skin that cling to the spires of ribs like flags of surrender. She is filled with grime and cracked pottery; copper and silver tithes for the ferryman, filling her mouth and eyes until, overflowing, they pool at her feet. She is preserved, like some lewd and unlovely statue of herself, unblushing in her nakedness. Indignant in the way it has shed her of her hero’s mien, left her bladeless and bloodless and buried leagues under the sand.
So far from the hallowed rays of the Aliila’alhaa, the Sun-God.
She slips from the soiled straw of her bed and absconds into the night.
This city is a mausoleum to her. A house of dead—a house of the long-lost, the laid to rest and the eternally restless. But for a necropolis, it is surprisingly lively. Perhaps that’s why she takes to the streets, shouldering aside the inebriated with gruff, unfriendly grunts; why she swerves amongst their heated, sweaty, redolent bodies. Even if their garbled, myriad voices are deafening in the stone echo chambers of her mind; and their smell is sweat and horsehair and alcohol on lips, and that’s far more than old dust and older stone. Because for untold years she knew only a crypt of her own keeping. A plain of existence reserved for her and her alone—plucked from the earth, laid below the living.
They had been the apotheosis, the closest to Solis, and for that, they had each paid a heavy toll.
She snatches a bronze goblet off of a tray on her way by. The mulled, spiced, amethyst liquid pitches dangerous and sheds droplets onto the cobbled ground as the Arete weaves through the formless, seething crowd, tucking her broad, pale wings close to her ribs. The tambourine, lyre and panflute play a raucous tune, the bawdy language of the bard that trills alongside is all but lost in the lurching of bodies. The soft purl of skin, the shrill peals of laughter.
She watches with cold distance as she walks the perimeter, feeling no more a part of this living world as she had the dead. An in-between.
The open archway of the door proffers a respite—quite, but not too quiet—and so she passes the sill and onto the outlook, the autumn night air moving into the vacuum left behind by the festal press. It is cool, making note of the martial angles and elegant curves of her body like a welcome, comfortable in its familiarity, even after all this time. She takes a deep breath, her throat pressing against the glinting copper serpent, and brings the edge of the cup to her lips. Vanilla and cinnamon, it beats the hell out of ash and dust. The Viper Slayer moves to unfurl her wings, to stretch them out in the pearly moonlight, but her sharp, blue gaze catches him and her lip twitches. Her body stiffens.
She needs more to drink.
Still, she cannot part now, cannot plunge back into the fray in soon, so she clears her throat and steps to look over the edge, their wings outstretched could measure the gap between them. “You’re a miserable recluse too, are you?” There is no warmth in the surprisingly soft, cold voice, just the faint trace of camaraderie behind the bite of sarcasm. She clears her throat again and, looking off into the darkness, across the twinkling hearthfires and convergent tides of equine bodies, “Cyrra.”
The cool stone against Noam’s chest tethers him down – grounds his spirit. Even as the mind began to drift – to a city thrown in chaos, to a palace decorated with bodies. There are moments his eyes catch their faces – weary, haunted glances that melt in the fire light, of stolen youth – that ebb and wane with the bodies below. Flesh pressed into bone like fine, translucent paper. Wafer thin.
Small reassurances resided in the cues of his breath – how far it could deepen, how much it would pull and stretch – ribs chaffing against skin.
The desire to take off and challenge the depths of that ink sky grew evermore. He grates his teeth together, yearning for such release. He knew better than to challenge the force behind his arrival, Solis willing… There must be a reason for the struggle building up behind his eyes, and the desire to purge what little there was in his stomach.
Noam tilts his mismatched gaze to the new arrival. The sound of her hooves – no matter the music – gives way to sprawling limbs, and refined, feminine curves. His sunken eyes remain blank, devoid of the energy bounding in a distant chorus. They rest upon the gilded neckpiece, set behind her skin of cream – the sand at dusk.
You’re a miserable recluse too, are you?
“Miserable is an understatement.” Noam lifts his gaze to take in her eyes. They’ve escaped him – off into pyres, into the bodies of the young and old, and everything in between.
Cyrra.
Takes a whiff of the beer, “Noam.”
It isn’t really a name, more of a placeholder, a shroud. ‘32’ made more sense – as an object, a thing to be used and identified. Catalogued and hung up to dry entombed with the others – were there others? Noam understood to some degree, that he had had a real name once – one in a forgotten language. A forbidden tongue, a savage speak that came and disappeared with the wind.
He considered the beer in hand. That it might dull his senses for once and blot out the shadows for a time. He presses the cup against his lips, takes a gluttonous swig and grimaces post taste. Letting out the hot, spiced air behind his lips.
“See anything worthwhile?”
He finds his gaze, again, above the crowds and into the sky. Where old friends shine unchanged, beaming cold indifferent light. Their language reads between them, in the forms they hold and the old legends they whisper of. He glances back to her – the woman who lurks beside him. Devoid of the humor or the mirth that speaks so loudly into the night, that hums and burns with the ale washing down his throat. Bright and fierce – beckoning, calling out good will, and indulgent joy.
“Will you dance with them?” She harbors the light of the night sky – hollowed out by the cold, the distance that sends her eyes upon the masses. He cannot tell if she yearns for their haste, for their cradle – or despises them, repulsed by the maggots that feast upon the castle.
You wrap your name tight around my ribs
And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
She swirls the amethyst liquid in her cup, watching the listless glint of firelight break on the heady, fragrant surface, before taking another deep drink.
It runs down her throat, warm and, Solis-willing, it kills the unwelcome, mutinous things it comes into contact with along its way to her muddled thoughts. The dread that fills her, dark and forlorn, with endless echoes of entombment. The sadness, heavy and heaving, of a decade lost to singular, chasmal darkness. Of all the things that could have been—the lingering doubts at the end of a blade, the linger doubts between some else’s bedsheets; the great, golden sunrises and copulations and bloodsheds. The anger that lives as a nest of vipers in her breastbone; that has always been there, but now mutates into self-consuming revenge. An animus that serves not to drum the tattoo of war into her veins, exhilarating and red, but the sickening tap-tap-ing of a treachery she cannot let go of.
A treachery she must let go of in order to move on.
But she’s never been good at moving on.
She has always been good at casting wrongs and right in iron, monuments to her steadfast and unwavering arrogance.
Her gaze lingers a moment longer on the city, on the pulsating way is seethes in the night, restive and raw. Gathering itself, putting joy and lust over wounds and old scars like tonics and salves. ‘Miserable is an understatement.’ She hmmms under her breath, a commiserate tone. Her brow raises as she turns her eyes to his, and wonders, briefly, what he drinks to kill, before rasing her goblet to toast the bitter truth, her bronze lips tilting in a mordant smile. “It often is, Noam.”
Cyrra watches him drink again and takes the cue, moving to press her own chest against the chilled sandstone barrier. She swallows and laughs, though it is hard and barbed, dreamy around the mulled edges, “Depends what worth I’m trying to get out of it tonight,” she turns her head. Through the arched doorway, shadows dance and flash in colour and light; shapeless masses that, in time with the music, bear faces like masks of emotions she does not understand. Twisted, foreign, strange lines. “It’s nice to know someone is enjoying themselves out there.” But her tone is acidic and drab, and when she looks back to him, she feels the pretence is only insulting, “or it’s fucking annoying.”
When he asks his next question, her bark of laughter is almost, almost, amused without any of the bite. She looks at him with a cocked brow, expectant, challenging, it says, ‘well, are you?’. Instead, she simply shakes her head, eyes fluttering shut for a moment. “Do I look like a dancer?” Maybe. In a way. She is agile, slender, but with muscle that speaks of dune-treading and pirouettes against the still foe of a training dummy.
She was branded a soldier at birth. Elegant in her propensity for violence; beautiful in the hard, serpentine curves and brutal, utilitarian angles.
Doesn’t mean she has never wished something different for herself. Doesn’t mean she has never danced, given herself over to the beat of a drum and thrum of an oud. But that was a decade ago. A long, subterranean solitude separates her from that person. “No. I’m here to watch, and be miserable. Tell me you at least had better intentions when you started your night?”
Her sharp words have the uncanny effect of smoothing out, unadulterated as soon as they hit the air. The ambience may have had that effect – the alcohol, the music – or perhaps it was something lurking beyond those cool cerulean eyes. Their conviction resonates of the living, of a fierce and wild thing restrained by little more than pleasantries.
A truth poisoned by the present.
“Or it’s fucking annoying.”
A grunt leaves his lips.
His last question gives to a small ounce of information, in the subtle way she challenges him with her eyes, and recoils altogether in a single motion. Again, the wild thing inside of her restrains itself – be it her calloused humor, and the pace of alcohol being consumed. Fatigue?
Cyrra’s laughter is one that resonates with the cool wind, aches with a bitterness longing for spring and summer to return. Brazen and disconnected from the rhythms that surround them, the souls that loose themselves to the flesh – all reveling in their present senses. She denies herself a dancer, denies the very thought – reserved to their balcony cage, pariahs at the edges of the light.
“How tragic then,” he begins at first. Breaking his otherwise blank exterior, for a wiry smile. “I’m afraid my intentions fail your high expectations.”
Instead of longing for the sky, or the singular beat of his heart in the expanse of the desert – Noam sets his pale eyes on her. Shifting once more against the twisting metal braided against her neck.
“I think I came here looking for ghosts.”
It feels as if they should be here. Fragments of the people he once knew, in another life, another time, passing through the halls with orders clutched tight against their breast. There is a yearning to kill the man who made him a weapon, for the singular act of forsaking him. For casting him aside, a half man made to wander the earth bearing only dark delights.
Without realizing, his smile has faded. His eyes burn with an uncanny liveliness. A pale fire, that fades just as quickly – bringing the last of his drink against his lips.
Noam clears his throat, shifting his limbs to angle his chest slightly towards her. Partially untethered from the coolness of stone.
“I don’t recognize this kingdom anymore... Might be worth drinking the night away – sorrows and misery and all that – what say you? Might make dancers of us all.” The last sentence is an attempt to jest, producing a cautionary tone.
You wrap your name tight around my ribs
And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
After all that time alone, one would think she would long for the dance, for the flesh; for the swirl of colour and music—the way they become one; lute in bright yellow, tambourine in mellow purple, impressionist and wild in their brushstrokes—and she is. Longing, that is. She wants to slip amongst them, to spin and shiver against skin and silk. To feel that throb like a conjoint heartbeat, fast and heavy. Surely alive—and that’s all that would really matter, in the end. That assurance.
That promise.
But she just can’t show it, that longing and that needfulness. She is, as he rightly makes out, a caged thing. Yoked to her own restraint and irascibility. Moored, now, to the way she feels unsure in her skin. In this world. In life. How she feels one foot in and one foot out—not yet free of the remains of the betrayer’s arcane magic. Consigned to the restive wandering—how many steps had she taken? How many sleepless nights because sleep was something Zakariah had left out of his design, made it inessential.
She is still trapped.
So Cyrra continues to wrap her wings tightly around her body, leaning against the stone railing and peering down into the abyss, tattooed with hearth-fires and string-lights, inked in a world she longs to be brought back into. And when he speaks her lips cock in a half-smile, again. She takes another sip, and looks back to him, content, she supposes (for now), in their verbal dance. “Ahhhhhh,” she tut-tuts, her tongue cupping the roof of her mouth with each percussion, “well. I wouldn’t be too worried, you’ll find most fail at that.”
True. An incredibly isolating truth, at that.
‘I think I came here looking for ghosts.’ And at this, entirely without thinking, she laughs. The kind of laugh that comes after sharing an inside joke—except it’s only inside of her and explanations always ruin the fun, don’t they? She sniffs, blinks what might be a stray tear from her eye and shakes her head with a sigh, “I came here running from them.” She could have also said, ‘you found one!’ but she’d rather not look into that mirror right now. She shifts her weight, head tilting ever so slightly—oddly, against the rigidity of her bronze neckpiece—“any ghosts in particular? Or are you the undiscriminating type?”
(There’s the wine.)
She collects herself. Pulls it all back together again—she’s good at that—and raises her glass, facing the impending doom of a glass far more than half empty. “Nor do I,” it had changed. A lot. And not just in the way it opened for the festival, but in ways she couldn’t yet fathom—like a puzzle with its pieces scattered wide. She hadn’t gotten up the courage yet to ask what had happened since the entombment of the Arete; to put all of that back together. It was, invariably, going to be a lot to process. “There’s no harm in trying.” She tilts her head back and finished the glass. Annihilation.
