When the oil wells of Persia burned I did not weep
until I heard about the birds, the long-legged ones especially
which I imagined to be scarlet, with crests like egrets
and tails like peacocks, covered in tar
weighting the feathers they dragged through black shallows
at the rim of the marsh. But once
There were some memories Zayir revisited while entombed more than others. Some of them, once pleasant, took on the haunted qualities of an old man’s ghosts. What was it, he had wondered for so long, that made them so persistent? How long could something be remembered until the colour faded from it like an overused, over-worn photograph? Even the colours of his memories, in his mind’s eye, have become an oppressive sepia. Devoid of life; belonging, truly, to another man.
Perhaps it is because he has slept for years that sleeping no longer comes easily to him. Zayir wanders out across the stark desert alone. The sun is setting on the distant horizon and he flies from that, too, toward the setting darkness. His flight carries him, haphazard, along the hot updrafts from the desert below. The fading light catches on the metallic tips of his wings. The air seems so thin, so precarious. Or perhaps those are only his unexercised wings.
The warrior is aghast to discover his muscles fatigue before he has even covered half the distance of his journey; he descends to the desert sands with trembling muscles. His breath comes more quickly than he would like and to regain composure he tucks his wings tightly to his sides and begins to trot.
By the time he reaches the oasis, Zayir is lathered in unexpected sweat. He feels not only fatigued, but strangely frail. He has lost weight during all those years. The time loop, no matter how indefinite, has strained his body to its limits.
He tries not to dwell on it more than necessary as he approaches the water. The sound of the waterfall greets him well before he sees it, and the lush greenery surrounding the oasis is a welcome sight. Autumn flowers are in bloom, albeit briefly, and nearby are several fig trees. He comes forward until he is resting knee-deep in the water. Zayir had forgotten just how distasteful he finds the sand, the way it sifts between every hair to grate against the skin. He closes his eyes momentarily.
The oasis is not as he remembers it. There is something softer about it, something more fragrant. And he realises that is because he is there in the flesh instead of agonising over small, over-remembered details. The water is warm and languid against him, running with small currents from the fall where it spouts from the sandstone.
Zayir shakes out his wings. This is where his nanny had often taken him as a child. This is where they had played many of their games of hide and seek. And also where the Arete had run training regiments, sending young men and women flailing through the deep pool to emerge on the other side, sparring and ready for combatants. He remembers laughing as the sand became wet and almost muddy; the way they had flailed limb-over-limb and then as the training progressed became more, and more, and more competitive, turning the oasis pinkish with blood. Everything he remembers seems to be tinged with that small bit of bitterness.
He is not surprised when he realises he isn’t alone. Zayir clears his throat and opens his eyes, glancing at the nearby foliage. There is something hard in his breast, like pride, or anger. He doesn’t know which.
“I didn’t expect company.” The way he says it is noncommittal, but anyone who knows him would realise there is a lilting quality of his tone, something that almost imperceptibly suggests playfulness. Meanwhile, the waterfall runs, and runs, and runs. The sound of it in the background is nearly mystic and, for someone so accustomed to silence, loud.
I told this to a man who said I was inhuman, for giving animals my first lament. So now I guard my inhumanity like the jackal who appears behind the army base at dusk, come there for scraps with his head lowered in a posture that looks like appeasement, though it is not.
She glows. Her heavy strands of black hair slide /
like serpents over somber, blood-red plush.
☼
Two errant comets upon their separate trajectories, either of Solis’ chosen map their way across the desert with separate agendas, chasing the wayward nothingness that the desert offers. A smatter of budding starlight guides the painted woman, her dark hair clinging to the drying sheen of sweat upon her nape. It was routine, by now, to run her limbs ragged—to thrash her silvery horn into the shadow, to beat back the intangible darkness with the fearsomeness of quivering limbs.
She has beaten greater threats than the irrepressible, crushing nothingness; that which speaks to her in haunting tongues when clouds blot out the moon, leaving nothing but the musk of a webby, sandy tomb to flood her nostrils—
For her, the midnight stretch of desert is a reprieve from the unbidden memories that surge to her in tides, and the endless invocation of songs she no longer wishes to sing.
(How can she, really, when the words are buried deep within? Black nails rake down the walls that divide her selves in two, cleaving apart an elusive identity that, day by day, draws teasingly nearer to her, only to part like the lapping ocean tide.
She is a creature controlled by the moon, and her wildly scattered pieces dangle like lures upon the cratered light’s crescent. She could take them by force, if she was yet brave enough to step back into the dark.)
The copse of the oasis welcomed her like a friend, the gurgling falls that fringed the rare pool of water humming its idle greeting. The rest of the desert remained in its perpetuating, eerie stillness, but the rare vitality of Solis’ gift is enough to drown her thoughts and to sweep the sweat from her spine. Having already regained her breath, the dappled mare knew there was nothing left to do but wait; to turn her hoary eyes skyward and glare upon the encroaching, abysmal darkness, to dare it too press too near.
Some nights, it did.
Others, her sparking embers were enough to keep it at bay.
Such was the war she waged since rousing from the catacombs, desert bound until she unearthed the courage to visit the walls of the Day Court. Even the dun-hued familiarity of home and hearth was crushing, suffocating her from miles away.
No, walls wouldn’t do—not now. Not when she, freshly woken from her tomb, was still something of a wild thing.
(And split apart, cursed to wonder and to wander; to chew upon the lie she’d been fed and to spit it out, bloody mouthed, when the taste turned sour.
A dream? A lie? Or another world entirely?)
She had no way of knowing where her sleeping soul had wandered. For now, in this instant of reality, she knew only the gritty bed of sediment upon which her dappled body lay. Hidden within the shadow of a looming fig tree and embraced by the pointed thimbles of thin, raggedy bushes, Hälla fixed her moony eyes upon the undulating saucer of the water.
Like a sandcat, she waited. She dwelled.
It was not the night that came to face her, though—but a face. A winged man gilt in sunshine, a strange juxtaposition within the cover of night, as though she’d expected his brightness to melt beneath the shadow. She is distant enough to watch idly as he dips himself into the water, the stoicism of her countenance betraying no secrets to the starlight.
She watches. Prepared to be noticed, and yet just as keen to linger in the preservation of her healing solitude.
But the Gods would have it another way as they locked eyes. Her chin lifted with equal pride, the silvery glint of her eyes disregarding any abashment at being found. No tension feathered her jaw, only a mulling rumination of what was to follow—she lingered in unmoving silence, her leonine tail brushing the sand beside her; thoughtful.
I didn’t expect company.
Her lip twitched. “The only water for miles, and you did not expect company?” She tsked softly, her dry amusement condemning the pride that flickered in his eyes. "I'm not here for you."
Still, there was something familiar about him, another misplaced memory. She gave it little consideration.
“But by all means,” her copper muzzle gestured to the rippling pool in which he'd bathed, her expression cool. “Continue.”
When the oil wells of Persia burned I did not weep
until I heard about the birds, the long-legged ones especially
which I imagined to be scarlet, with crests like egrets
and tails like peacocks, covered in tar
weighting the feathers they dragged through black shallows
at the rim of the marsh. But once
Zayir, when he looks at her, does not see feminine beauty or poise. He sees the scar kissing her throat, an indelicate and permanent necklace. Zayir thinks, I have dreamed that very thing but cannot place where the ornate, painted colour of the mare belongs in his memory.
Zayir stares at her harder than is polite. Zayir stares at her with the gaze of a falcon, or great and terrible cat. Predatory. Sharp. Endless.
The only water for miles, and you did not expect company? Her reply is not as barbed as it could have been, and Zayir’s lip twists into an almost-smile. “Ah, m’Lady, anyone native to Solterra knows the people here don’t need water. Only their pride.”
I’m not here for you.
Zayir nods as she dips her lips to the water. “Thank you, for your permission. You are kind, m'lady, for allowing me to stay." There is still a wry, almost-smile on his mouth.
He realises he is staring with such ferocity because, the longer he looks, the more familiar he finds her. Zayir stretches out his wings, testing the muscles for their soreness. He is quiet for a long moment, with only the sound of the water against him, before he asks in a quiet voice, “And what is your name? I am Zayir.”
Something is welling in his chest.
It is a hard knot; the feeling of nerves, tangled in so many different ways. This time, however, the knot is hard with a fragile hope; breakable, tentative, expectant.
I told this to a man who said I was inhuman, for giving animals my first lament. So now I guard my inhumanity like the jackal who appears behind the army base at dusk, come there for scraps with his head lowered in a posture that looks like appeasement, though it is not.
She glows. Her heavy strands of black hair slide /
like serpents over somber, blood-red plush.
☼
His intensity was unguarded, and she, ever a creature of mirrors, met him half-way. The hoary white of her eyes shone beneath the desert night, the ripples of the water between them reflecting within those twin, moony saucers. She gauged him with a languid appraisal, like inspecting the finer aspects of a meal, but she did not dare let memory surface.
She could feel it there, an aimless creature beneath the surface, inquisitively probing the confines of its cage before she, ever brutal, shoved its head back down. If Hälla remembered him, she would not yet dare let that knowingness come to light.
Locking eyes across the chasm that split them apart (time, sand, water), she was unflinching when his words split the budding silence echoing her own. The corner of her mouth twitched at his pleasantries, a juxtaposition to the aridness around them. But befitting, perhaps, of the oasis.
And like the rare water that lay before them, she wondered, too, if his niceties were a mirage. She was no lady, the string of pearly scars she wore about her throat betrayed as much. Between his courtesy, whether feinted or true, and the nature of his reply, she could only smile.
As always, the fangs were put away—but the venom still remained, heady and thick within her gums. She saw no reason to use it.
“Anyone native to Solterra, my lord,” she demurred carefully, still lazing upon her bed of sand. “Knows the desert will sap you dry, heedless of where you come from.” His point was made, even so, she knew Solis people to wear their pride as stripes of sunlight upon their skin—she knew, too, that her arrogance had entrapped her within a tomb of would-be glory, with nothing but false triumph to rot her grinding teeth over the years.
He spoke again, and this time, Hälla huffed a snort of dry laughter. “So very kind,” she concedes, the pale highlights of her forelock spilling across her brow, curling around the base of her whetted horn. He continued to stare, even as her parched lips found the reprieve of the Oasis, and so her slit eyes caught upon his beneath the fringe of her lashes. Calculating, careful.
It was with bitter resentment that she found herself missing Avallac’h—or at least, the sincerity of his pleasantries. The self-admission was enough to make her choke on frustration, though she kept her features calm as she watched this stranger.
And what is your name?
Her head lifted from the water, her lungs drawing in a mouthful of cooling air, the dryness of the desert saturated with the sparse, verdant splendors of Vitae.
Zayir—
Her eyes flashed, a jolt of… something tightening her muscles. She could’ve perused the many corridors of her mind, and she knew she would never fully unearth into what story this man, this Icarus boy, belonged; but she knew that name.
Like a passing breath—spoken in tandem with a command, issued from the word of a fellow soldier. Not known intimately, perhaps, but nonetheless ringing with stark familiarity.
She knew him—
No. She would not let herself know him.
“Hälla,” she answered slowly, gathering her legs beneath her. She did not rise shakily as she had that day she’d crawled free from the tombs. Her strength, gruelingly, had begun to return. A head shorter than he, the Unicorn’s chin lifted slowly.
Memories of childhood are still and distant; at the oasis, with the chime of the water, Zayir can almost hear the laughter of better, brighter days. But not quite, no; it is only water. It is only dark, empty sand that is already sifted through the hourglass. So is he, staring at this white-and-bay creature, corded and familiar and wrought in an image so like his own.
Do you hear it?
The laughter?
Of course she doesn’t and, anyways, he is hearing only the water. Or so he tells himself, when he gazes into her eyes and wonders at what gazes back. There is something there, he thinks, mirror-like and strange; something that sees him as what he is. His exaggerated pleasantries twitch her lip. Anyone native to Solterra, my lord. Zayir smiles, too, and the smile belongs to a man dead in his soul despite being so boyish, so genuine, so charismatic. “You’re no fun,” he says wryly, as child does anyone who vanquishes myth.
They are too much like dancing falcons, spiralling around one another. They are too much like vipers encircled; like cobras entranced. He knows why when she shares her name and all of it crashes upon him violently.
“Halla.” Zayir repeats, with knowing in his eyes. “Halla of the Arete.” The catacombs had done strange things to all of them.
You are Solterran, then.
He wants to say, Don’t you remember my father?
Instead Zayir smiles, more wryly still: “Only half.”
