Don’t ask him for reasonings, he has none. Does anyone ever? No, he just has a feeling. That type of feeling that gnaws on the skull, fangs scraping against bone, loudest when it’s quiet - like here, in this endless sand. He first felt it in his youth, when he was but a boy. The memory is vivid when it comes:
He’s a gangly child again, legs too long and knees scraped raw from play, and he’s alone. His mother wasn’t neglectful by any means, but she certainly afforded her son more freedom than most parents ( more than most would ever think appropriate - but why worry? Her son was godtouched, what in the sand would dare show him anything but mercy?
Zakariah could never say they were close, in no short part because of this. She loved him as a mother should, but also in that same way a houndkeeper loves their prized dog. Her pride was hardly Zakariah’s to claim at all, not for his actions, but simply for the manner of his magic. He was something to behold, something to boast, something to display like a medal.
But she did love him. )
Anyway, he’d wander off like children do, except his mother would only watch him disappear from sight, confident he’d return at some point. The horizon has swallowed his herd before he’s realized, and he’s mostly alone now.
Mostly, because the ground shifts before him. He likens the way the sand falls off the serpent’s body to water, in waves. The viper is more frightened than he is, and Zakariah is foolish enough to lean closer to the low hiss it emits. It does not strike him. It makes no move to, either. It simply holds his gaze - eyes a green so brilliant you’d think them gemstones. In some way, its benevolence is more unsettling than aggression.
It doesn’t need to kill him.
It knows, one day, these sands will take him instead.
He’s always had a feeling, since that day. He thought of it ( dreamed of it ) often in the catacombs - some days so lucidly that the moments following him waking were feverish and panicked.
Zakariah wondered if this was what justice felt like.
It’s only when he exits the catacombs and revisits his home that he realizes justice is a myth, that karma was too fond of him. He’d have wasted away in that hell of his own making if either of those things existed, truly. He’d have died in the dark.
So he’s not really worried about actions, and their consequences. Not yet, anyway. He doesn’t think death will visit him anytime soon. But when it does, it will be in the sand.
And death must leave a soul hungry.
Because when he looks at the sun bleached bones before him, belonging to some long dead dog, they remind him of teeth. Bared, desperate, dangerous. A ghost, stubbornly huddled into its own corpse, snarling for another chance at life. He wants to help it. To tell it…
The gods are deaf, if they’re there at all. And you are best where you are, partly gone beneath the dunes, forgotten.
Zakariah regards the bones a moment longer, then hums a pensive note.
Will he, too, refuse his death? So violently, so silently?
... No. No, he was rightly full of life, wasn't he?
@tag / speaks / notes
01-03-2021, 08:44 PM - This post was last modified: 01-03-2021, 08:45 PM by Zakariah
You can tell, you can tell, you can absolutely tell
I’m pushing everything about me up one hell of a hill
Sabrina thinks the desert is boring.
First of all, it's all one color, something reminiscent of the scratchy, sickly noodle shade of her hair-- and about the same texture, too. It rasps against her flesh as she pushes onward through the undulating dunes, jaw clenched in a caged ferocity, unwilling to let the environment get the better of her. She’s parched and sore and blistered in spots, and she thinks tips of her uppermost primaries are beginning to color black, like something baking, taken in the heat of the oven.
It’s a mystery to her, this strange obsession with the desert, why she kept coming back here, to this god-forsaken place of all places; but she knows she goes to the shitty places first because she doesn’t want to encounter them later in her journey, when she’s weaker, tired, and kind of lift her lip and go, ehh, and turn away.
She doesn’t want to face that golden ghost at the end of the tunnel as he glared at her with summer-green eyes. You promised you’d bring her home.
What if she was here, at the ass-end of nowhere? What if her kidnappers had locked her away in some sneaky, freaky sand vault? A temple buried under a trillion-million grains of golden silt, and she the jewel at it’s center.
Delph was always special. Sabrina was just the afterthought.
Though, she couldn’t imagine being more tired than she is now. Her back is sore and her wings are heavy and she’s just slammed her pastern into something hard sticking up out of the sand; she stomps it again, a few times for good measure, before she realizes it’s bone. She sticks her horn-- gilded, useless garbage, like the rest of this place-- through an eyehole and hoists it from where it’s half-buried in dirt. It’s some sort of predator, she realizes when it plops harmlessly back to earth where she tossed it. It has a set jaw and sharp, sharp fangs, polished pearly in the swell of the dunes, and Sabrina can imagine it grinning, hungry, in the dark, just before whatever it hunted escaped its jaws.
She rolls her eyes and lets her head fall back, sighing into the empty, soulless sky.
One sharp step and she smashes it, sending it sinking into the sand in three parts.
She’s thinking about the futility of it all, the weight on her back and the way out of here when she sees him; she imagines he’s a mirage, at first, and thinks fuck I’ve been out in the sun way too long. He glimmers in the summer sun and moves like mist, impossible here in such a dry clime. And he’s golden in a way that makes her breath catch; and he’s walking in her direction, the motion filling her with fear, because she thinks he’s a ghost, she thinks he’s her ghost, and, boy, that wasn’t very much time at all, you impatient bastard.
But the sun shifts and glints off his antlers and he becomes more physical the closer he is and she snorts, loud, her irritation audible, and she feels stupid and shattered all at once.
She wants to go up to him and just punch him, clock him a good one in the jaw, for some unknown reason. But she doesn’t.
Instead, she approaches to peer at the bones at his feet, see if they matched the bones she'd found.
They didn't. “For as awful as this place is,” she says, voice a growl, “I can’t seem to stop running into people here.”
Mors was awfully crowded for the end of the fucking world.
He’s never found the desert lonely. He supposes most people would take a single look at the vast sands, abandoned and untraveled as they are, and they’d it so, and he doesn’t blame them really. He does wonder, though, why the sky is not regarded with the same pessimism. Zakariah is convinced staring up too long would take his sanity, slowly. And see, because for something so fucking busy and colorful and bright and ever changing…
I mean, it was awful empty wasn’t it?
He’s not once seen a god in all those stars. He’s not once seen some other worldly being in the sun. He’s not once found purpose in all those stars, or all those clouds. And really you’d think, if there was anything so divine to be seen, it’d be in the sky, wouldn’t it? It’d be up there, somewhere, and Zakariah hasn’t seen shit.
It doesn’t occur to him that the sky is alien to him, now. ( Or perhaps, more accurately, fear inspiring. To be imprisoned beneath the earth, then returned to everything all at once could bring good men to madness. And Zakariah couldn’t truly call himself good, or much a man. He looks to the sky and frost spills into his veins, his stomach gapes wide, and a cold sweat settles into his hide. He used to live beneath this, once. Once, he used to run beneath it and find a joy in its heat upon his back.
Now, it’s oppressive. It’s an atlas weight, and his knees are weak. )
The sand is familiar. This place, seemingly desolate and uninhabitable as it is, is familiar. And if you walk long enough, you will find company, dead or alive. This time company finds him. He doesn’t mind. He hears her before he sees her.
“For as awful as this place is, I can’t seem to stop running into people here.”
She looks far more pleasant than she sounds, least in the eyes. They’re blue, but not like the sky. He’s never seen the ocean, but he’s read of it. The texts describe it as siren songed. Something with depths unseen, tantalizing enough to tempt but dark enough not to be easily explored. Beautiful as it was deadly. He’s read of drowning, of how water takes one’s lungs as their home and leaves nothing else, of how the vision darkens and the chest heaves and the ocean holds you close - a fly in a trap.
He imagines her eyes are kind of like that, like the sea.
“Awful as it is, here you are,” he muses. "Are you lost, then?"
So many were, here. Most in fact, in one way or another. The desert had its own siren song of sorts, didn't it?
You can tell, you can tell, you can absolutely tell
I’m pushing everything about me up one hell of a hill
When you look close enough, the desert is teeming with life; snakes in the sand, ground squirrels nesting amongst the clusters of rocks, a sky teeming with vultures and falcons… all the way down to the beetles crawling into the flesh of the dead to lay their eggs and propagate the next generation, the desert was anything but lonely. To the untrained eye-- or the one on the cusp of death, as so many are when they stumble into this vast unknown-- it probably looked like the end of the road, barren and soulless and devoid of the touch of any god save for the cruelest.
The sky wasn’t empty either, but it probably looked that way to someone with no wings, someone tethered to the earth. It was just so far away, so far and so hard, at times, and the horizon line was a staunch divide between where one could go and where one couldn’t.
Once, for her, the sky had been filled with gold, and thunderous laughter, and love. But now it was poison, a siren’s song, constantly calling her to come gambol amongst the clouds until the magic fried her brain and she ended up crashing broken-necked back to earth. It had happened more than once.
The only god Sabrina had ever kept was the connection between her and her sister; the only time she’d ever worshipped was on palatial golden sheets, touched by love, and shivering in a strong embrace. Now her days of veneration were ashen memories and her god was lost in this vast continent of pretenders and strange magic.
This counterfeit ghost had almost shocked her back to her godfearing days. But not only was he a living, breathing creature, but his eyes were also the wrong color. A play off molten gold, like motes of light in a warm fireplace. Hot honey in her throat. Not the green and sharp of rosestems. He speaks and he’s much more eloquent than Puck ever hoped to be. There’s no snide secrecy in his tone, no hidden joke, a simple question and some sort of poetry.
“Here I am,” she says simply, an acknowledgement, an acceptance. Here she was. Trekking, once again, into the hardest parts of the world on an endless quest with a dying trail and only an iron will prodding her in the ass to move her along.
Was she lost? In more ways than one.“I don’t know my destination.” A mistruth? Something hard to articulate. Forward. “Guess I can’t be lost if I don’t know where I’m going.”
Sabrina never went looking for company but maybe she could enjoy his; just as soon as the thought popped into her head, she quashed it, feeling queasy, torn somewhere between he’s a pile of ash scattered to the winds and you are a living, breathing creature and when you said forever you meant forever. “I’m looking for someone,” she said, after clearing her throat. “She’s a mare, four years younger than I am, with a opalescent coat, pink eyes, magenta hair and a ruby horn. Like mine, but… better,” she finished lamely, remembering the useless, golden bauble soldered in the center of her forehead.
