“Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion."
The desert has never been able to keep its secrets from her. Not when she drags them into the dunes with a primordial savageness each grain of sand understands. And perhaps this secret, the black-center of Solterra, is one that leaked into the magic of the earth and made monsters.
It's with the monsters that she comes to the black-center. Things made to devour mortals race in the dune below her hooves, and sand-storms gather like a storm in the clouds billowing up like hounds at her heels. Eligos gallops shoulder-to-shoulder with her, and their lungs heave with the howls rising like soot from their lips. Here there is nothing for them to devour, or hunt, or chase until their hearts are hanging on the edge of a cliff.
Here everything is already dead or dying.
The city is quiet as they cross the stone gates guarding the heart of Solterra. No guards try to stop them, perhaps inspired to silence by the shine of Eligos in the moonlight that has been whispered to them in nightmares. And there is no one to follow as they make their way to the jagged scar in the sand and stone. It doesn't matter, not with the bones singing to her like sirens below the dirt--
Not with the way all the ancient death is calling her home.
She does not care why the bones are here, nor how much the long rotted flesh that once sheltered them suffered. It is enough that they are here, shining bone and diamond white in the firelight surrounding the entrance. It is enough to hear the song in the silence, the low hum of decay and dust echoing like the heart of the earth. Their footsteps are silent as they follow the thrumming chant and their shadows blend into the darkness like a tangle tomb sliding between the others (sentient instead of still).
Thana continues onward, listening perhaps to the bone-song and her heart-song, as the darkness grows blacker and darker, and thick enough to choke on. Even then she does not stop. A faded banner flutters like a blossom in the wake of her movement. It is the banner that makes her stop when she finally reaches it.
And when she lays her cheek against it, and turns it to dust, Thana starts to hum the song of the catacombs. The darkness is not silent then..
It is purring, and hungry, and awake, awake, awake.
styx this carver of caverns beneath us is. styx this black water, this down pouring. the well is deep. from its stillness the words our voice speak echo. resonance follows resonance. waves of this sound coming up to us.
When Zayir had been entombed, he had met Death in the eye of Time, gleaming like a salt-tear. He had met Death in the absolute darkness of his sleepless sleep, where the gravity held in the way of dead stars. The darkness of that Death is in him now, in that endless trip of memories and semi-consciousness, of wandering neither awake nor asleep.
The same feeling follows him in the throb of his own heart, a constant reminder of mortality. At night he dreams of the Reaper sleeping at his feet like a dog, scythe clenched in his jaws, or of Acheron with a purse full of dead men’s coins. Even in death we must pay. He thinks of the river Neilos and arriving there with no copper coins, for Acheron to say, you cannot afford to die.
But such things are stories his father told him. And they are stories that have repeated in his own mind for a decade, until they feel more real than the citizens now within Solterra’s walls. Zayir does not sleep but walks through the tired city, bleached white-and-silver by the moonlight.
He goes back to his tomb. He descends into the catacombs with the care of a man going to rest; step-by-step, nearly shuffling. Zayir tucks his wings and enters with a strange, familiar calm. These crypts are more familiar to him now than the city he once bled for. These crypts are more humane, he thinks, than what exists outside of them.
He should take a torch with him, but does not. Instead Zayir descends into the darkness-that-is-death. He hears the catacombs, then—it is the sound of his slumber, the sound of his endlessly, self-consuming dreams that tumbled end-over-end in his mind until he could no longer tell the truth from the lie, the reality from the fantasy, the memory from the truth. A humming like a heartbeat about to end. A humming like a bird’s fragile wings. A humming like a boat against the current.
Zayir follows, trance-like, into the deeper dark. He follows until the distant moonlight is only a memory and everything seems absolute, until his eyes adjust to the faint bioluminescence that exists strangely within the catacombs as if magic, as if rotting with it.
He answers the song by pulling the forgotten blade of one of the dead Arete from the old warrior’s crypt, and slicing a line of flesh across his heart. He answers the song when his blood drip, drip, drips onto the stone floor. Then Zayir drops the blade and it clatters in the dark, ringing, ringing, ringing into the hum like a last breath.
"Speaks" || @Thana
three thousand years we have recited its virtue out of hesiod. it is twenty-five thousand since the ice withdrw from the lands and we came forth from the realm of caverns where the river beneath the earth we knew we go back to. styx pouring down in the spring from its glacial remove, from black ice. fifty million years, from the beginning of what we are, we knew the depth of this well to be. fifty million years deep (but our knowing deepens, time deepends) this still water we thirst for in dreams we dread
“Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion."
Even the stones devour the song of death into their cold chests as if they might swallow a war-drum instead of a heart. Blood rushes slow and oil thick in her veins, fat with slumber instead of wrath. The darkness presses harsh and hard into the creases of her rib cage and the dip of her spine as if it might find organs to fill it to wakefulness. Thana sings, and hums, and coos her grave-stone chime, until the darkness is as aching and bloated as a corpse.
The whispering drum of his hooves echoes in her bones as they turn to watch the stallion approach. He echoes in the black chasm of her like a stone thrown into the belly of the earth with a wish tied neatly around it. And she wants to smile at him, with teeth, and wrap her tail around his neck like a noose and drag him home, home, home into the blackness of her song.
Eligos wants to sketch a map of blood on the dusted stones to lead him home. At his paws the dust trembles, and rises, and opens up gaped and jagged jaws of hunger upon twelve sets of paws.
The darkness still hums on.
And then there is the whisper of steel, and the sharp sigh of flesh as it gives, and folds, and weeps for the blade. Thana hums on even as she steps closer, and closer, and closer. Like a wolf, or a ray of moonlight etching lines through the thick forest silence.
She smiles as the blade clatters in the darkness like a comet crashing into a mountain peak. Nothing hums but the echo of the blade ringing on, and on, and on though the darkness like bells of war. The drip of blood is a star-flicker in the darkness, a flavor on the edge of her lips of fermented fruit, a ritual drawing her pathways to the home hiding buried in his bones. Thana breathes into the darkness, a huff of air passed between jackals and wolves and lions at the belly of a kill.
“Come away.” The wolves say to the jackals and the lions to the wolves.
The gap-toothed sand creatures paw at the drops of blood and the steel blade still chiming against the stone like a hungry thing only teased instead of satiated. They twine between them like wildcats, and voles and sand-pipers with teeth instead of tongues.
Come Away. Her voice is still echoing down the endless black hallways and between the sockets of skulls when Thana exhales against the wound in his chest.
Come. Away. From the light. From death. From the corpse at the watering hole. From the hollow grave with no more blades to steal.
implacable Styx, All else, graces or muons, it crumbles
How, in all her magic, can she not realise. He is already home. He is already dead. There is more than one way to rot; there is more than one way to succumb, gradually or abruptly, to decay. It is in my soul. His eyes are bright like ichor; the blood at his breast looks as if it belongs there, as if his entire life has culminated for this pairing of colours: red on white, white on gold. Zayir measures her with his eyes and knows, in a way arcane and eternal, the echo of magic, magic, magic. There is something familiar in the way her companion conjures dust into bloodthirsty beings; there is something familiar in the way they lap at his blood but continue to starve.
Come away she says.
His laughter emerges so abruptly it surprises even himself. That sound echoes, too, to follow her voice into the dark caverns of death and decay. Zayir cannot help it; he laughs, and laughs, and the laughter itself is as coarse and brittle as the bones around them.
“To where?” Zayir asks. She is too close to him; but her presence is like brushing up against an old, half-forgotten friend. All this time, and nothing has changed. His eyes continue to gleam; they belong more to a great and terrible cat; a Sun Lion, a teryr, a god.
But Zayir is only a man. His mortality is freshly remembered in the sting of his wound.
And then, he reaches for something deep within himself; a fumbling mental grasp, for more. Zayir’s lack of magic is like a phantom limb; he feels it, he remembers it, but when he steps forward it is gone.
Abruptly, he thinks, I do not need magic. Zayir lashes out at the dust creatures; one, two, three powerful stomps of his hooves against the ground. The sound echoes. Resounds. The violence is it’s own type of poetry.
Her companion is something Zayir has seen in a dream, in a nightmare, in these endless catacombs. A demon. A thought. A memory. All and none of those things.
“To where, unicorn?” But Zayir already knows. She carries death around her shoulders as if she is the plain after the battle, bogged with blood and misery. Zayir has already been there.
“Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion."
The shadows seem full of crimson teeth, and a hundred things as quickly snuffed out as a candle, when he opens his teeth and bitterness pours out. She wonders if he's choking on it in the way that drowning things choke on water like it's oil instead of life. How fragile this all seems to her, from blade to bitterness, blood to a mockery all the things leaking out in a place too dark for their shadows to exist.
She watches him thrash against the sand monsters like a pale moon flailing against an eclipse. “It will not help” A whisper. A threat when her horn catches in the darkness as cocks her head like a lion to listen closely to the sound of his hooves, sand, and stone. How easy, her form seems to say, to kill beasts made of sand and fury.
And when she smiles it says, I am neither sand nor fury.
Eligos lays his cheek against her shoulder and the flash of his teeth in the darkness is as loud as any thundering snarl. His eyes flash golden as the stallion's, molten and full of a hundred almost-sounds that might ring against the echoing laughter like a bell. The tip of his tail paints arcane arcs in the dust, each curling in a patterns older even than the bones rising around them like guardians of the darkness.
He waits.
He waits for--
Thana does not let her moon-bright smile fade when she grabs hold of the fallen blade and lifts it up like an olive branch between them. And she does not let her gaze follow the drops of blood still falling from the tip of it when her magic starts to ache for the sight of it (she knows the flavor of them, the iron, and the rot already). “Anywhere but wherever you were trying to go when you cut lines into your chest, pegasus.” Her smile blazes like a warning snare.
The amethyst of her gaze looks more black than lilac when she lightly holds the blade and spins it between them like a compass arrow. A drop of blood lands on her brow but there are no monsters left to rise from the sorrowful bitterness of his violence.
“Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion."
Something in the catacombs is suffering. The moan it makes sounds like the sea at high tide. Thana can hear it calling in the lingering darkness. She can feel the agony of it, of bone sliding against bone far beyond the protection of muscle and flesh. In answer her own heart races and leaps in her chest like a legion of predators at the wateringhole.
Eligos turns towards the sound first. The coldness of the graves races against her skin when he pulls away from her to lift his head back in a howl that is both darker and holier than one any desert monster might make. His hunger spikes to a fever and Thana can feel it through their link when her own answers back.
They are far from caring about mortal men, with mortal blood, and gold where she prefers scars. There is no apology on their feral sneers as they go (or if there any feeling in their looks at all is one mortal things are not born to understand).
Their steps echo in the darkness until they too sound like the sea at high tide.
And when the screaming starts they are still nothing more than echoes in the darkness, felt as much as they are heard.
