You wrap your name tight around my ribs
And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
Cyrra gulps down the last of the mulled wine and lets the bronze cup clatter to the ground.
The world swims.
The world is warm and heady.
No.
It’s cold.
She curls into herself, folding over the newly cleaned straw of her bed in the inn she had taken up long-term residence in since awakening from the catacombs and being rescued from the stygian depths by Zayir. Downstairs, lute music trills under the overtones of The Duneworm Inn’s rambunctious patrons. Laughter and yelling; a festal, lively, seething sound that has been her lullaby for the past few weeks or so.
It soothes her.
It reminds her she is not alone.
Except, up here, she is.
Up here she is all alone. And cold, though her body, from throat to knee, is held in the quietive hands of alcoholic reverie, rocking like mother’s hips in the womb to some semblance of sleep—the only reliable form of sleep she has found yet. (Umma and Big-Spear would be scandalized.). Her stark, swimming blue eyes flutter shut, lashes touching the high, august line of cheekbone, both nestling against the abrasive rub of straw. Her breath, spiced and slightly sour, becomes even in time. Deep and rhythmic as she marches like an intrepid pilgrim backwards. Or forwards.
Or neither, for the dream-world has not longitude nor latitude, but is a place without limitation.
And yet…
☉
The darkness is lit by the oily flames of soot-black braziers, spaced in long, even intervals. Enough, that the path ahead seems certain, but the margins around and between are full of the looming, growing dread of unknown. Unknown for some. Too familiar to her. She takes a stiff, militant step forward. The clack of her hoof on the old stone echoes. She squints up, but she cannot see the ceiling, for they are vaulted high, and though they are festooned with the images of Gods and souls in search of Gods—once painted but now flaking bare and dulled—nobody could possibly see the storied carvings in the pitch darkness.
The stale smell of that crypt’s foul air fills her nostrils, blots out any residual perfume of fermented fruit and horsehair. “Hell beacons, come,” she mutters, and the way the charnel silence eats her words makes her stomach lurch. The Viper Slayer gives her head a sharp shake and walks, the tips of her crackled hooves dragging along the dusty stone floor—tshhhh-clack, tshhhh-clack—as she begins her tireless shift.
(It feels like forever.
Another ten years went by, before you appear.)
Cyrra is not used to another in this place, and so, at first, she mistakes the form for another spectre haunting. She acknowledges it with narrowed eye and a curt snort, but then the world of her mind’s own making begins to crack and split at the seams around the visitor. She stops, her head held high, chin tucked towards her chest, in proud, guarded distrust. “How did you get here?” she demands, her voice is iron and venom, aching.
Perhaps it is not the visitor who reveals the weaknesses in her mind-prison willingly, but by simply being, extends to Cyrra the possibility that this hell is not as real as it seems.
Perhaps, the visitor does not see it like this, but to Cyrra’s hard gaze, the faintest trace of sunlight halos the lucid stranger.
I hope this works! Feel free to powerplay the setting of course! @Dune
JUST AS LITTLE IS SEEN IN PURE LIGHT AS IN PURE DARKNESS
At first it was exhilarating. A different dream every night, a different dreamer. He swam in foreign seas, water warm as sunlight, and flew through the stardust of far-flung galaxies. He was a sunflower seed in a sea of bent orange, and a silver cloud in a cobalt sky. Once they just sat beneath a gnarled tree, him and the dreamer, and let an ancient breeze pass them by.
Sometimes he fought-- sometimes he died-- sometimes he fell in love or straight through the fabric of the dream and into the dark, desolate expanses of the mind. There were tears, and laughter, and many miles of silence. Endless new sights, scents, smells, all his for the sensing.
Night after night he dipped into his magic, and like any other drug there were side effects. Most days he could hardly keep his eyes open, he was so spent from the dreaming. And for a while, he managed. The work he did typically did not require much attention-- pulling carts back and forth across the city, tilling lavish, sprawling gardens in the high quarter, other things he could practically do with his eyes closed. But it was festival season and he was expected to work all of them, so for at least a few nights he needed sleep. Proper sleep.
Of course, the gods would not give him that.
He’s blinking dumbly, hardly aware of where he is when the iron of the dreamer’s voice slides harmlessly over his skin. “How did you get here?”
First he looks at the mare, coiled like a snake, proud, fierce and, perhaps he reaches too far, a little lonely, and he thinks to himself “dangerous, that one.” Then he turns to look behind him, as if there might be an answer hidden between marble columns and shadow. There isn’t. He turns back to the dreamer with a shrug. “You left the door open.” The words are faintly accusational, tongue lingering on the you with a cheekiness he would never exhibit in the waking world.
The bay glances at the cavern around him, taking in the chipped columns, flaking paint, dusty floor. It smells like absence-- like stale time-- and soot. All he wanted tonight was restful sleep... Instead he’s caught in someone’s dream, and it’s not even a pleasant one. He sighs heavily.
“Nice place.” Well aren’t we a tart little cherry tonight? “What terrible thing did you do to end up here?” As he peers into the darkness above, the halo of light around him grows brighter, brighter, brighter until he sees the outline of the vaulted ceiling. Escape would not be so easy as growing wings and flying away. He sighs again, twice as heavy as before, and the light around him quickly dims.
You wrap your name tight around my ribs
And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
(You’ve dreamed this dream before.
You are always going backwards.
You are always stepping into a series of grave hallways that do not proceed, but revert, circulate; loop back on to each other, rucked and disobedient to any waking laws of physics or space.
You march. You patrol your ossuary, looking for the cracks in the illusion.
But it isn’t an illusion.
You are living it again. You are entombed until something—the screech of a hawk at hunt, a peel of laughter from the tavern below, a knock at the door from the keep, looking for the week’s deposit—wakes you, undoes the stitches of that arcane, devilish rune.
Except, you are always alone—)
☉
She eyes him with keen, hard suspicion.
Nobody has ever joined her here. She has called and called out, until her throat is raw and the taste of blood on her lips tells her she can call out no more. She has looked, searching for a single soul with breath and life and biology, just enough to let her know this place—this dream, this mimic-hell—lives. A moth, drawn to the oily braziers. A bat, hanging upon a curved and cracked piece of moulding. But silence always answers, with dry throat and swollen language, thick and incoherent.
This place is sterile, salted earth. An untended garden, gone to seed.
So when he comes, limned in light, an answer to a timeless, desperate question, she wonders if he might not be another of Zakariah’s eidolons; a thing made of brutal betrayal and time-bending allurement. Her lips twitch and pull back from her teeth in a scowl, tail flicking in tense irritation against the cold, tight curves of her haunches, waiting for him—it—to answer for himself.
‘You left the door open.’
A low, warning grumbling spills from her bronze lips, eye narrowing. “Had someone only told me there was a door,” she breaths, sardonic and tired as she watches him take in the catacombs as they had been for her. As they had been for her, for a decade, punishment for flying too close to the sun. For reflecting fierce pride into the eyes of jealous contempt.
At least, that’s how she sees it.
Zolin and his cadre surely saw it otherwise.
Bastards all.
Cyrra snorts, a short, sharp exhale of breath, mordant and vaguely amused. The Viper Slayer takes a step forward, peering to her right down a hallway lined with bones and urns, the corner lit dimly with lamplight, but utter darkness prevails down the length until, perhaps twenty paces in, where another lit fire licks at the uninviting black, throwing spectral shadow puppets across the floor.
“Most kind,” she considers the fork at which they stand, before turning her eyes back to him, to the strange, outside light that wreaths his form, her ears catching the question with distinct distraction. “I made a king pout,” she mutters—unable and frankly unwilling to hide the disdain spat into the last word—she shifts her weight, running her tongue across her dry lips.
Then, that light, that balefire, fades around him and her face falls, ears drooping to the side, corners of her lips coming to a frown. “Alqarf,” she sighs and picks up the resigned mien of her body, putting it back together in straight, uniform, militant posture. She looks him in the eyes, disappointment and annoyance colouring each word, “I thought you… knew the way out. Or… were the way out, or... something.”
Cyrra shakes her head, and brushes past him, eyeing the corner, but continuing the way she had been going. That is, no way at all, really. “Keep up, I promise, there is nothing beyond me here.”
She, uh, warms up, I swear - @Dune
hover for translation
JUST AS LITTLE IS SEEN IN PURE LIGHT AS IN PURE DARKNESS
“Had someone only told me there was a door.”
Her sarcasm brings a grin, bright but fleeting. One had the sense that joy was not allowed here. And although the seeds of it may sprout in the cracks in the stone, there was no point in taking root. Nothing here was allowed but-- not quiet pain, it was something else-- but nothing at all.
A long exhale. “”Kings.” He rolls his eyes, thinking of Orestes and Ipomoea, then not just kings but nobility in general, fickle and frail as spun sugar. Something about having everything you could ever ask for, it made one rot from the inside out.
And how they made the world go round, these rotten apples. Dune personally could not scrape by without the nobility. The old families, established as stone… he tended their gardens, hauled their many imports from the docks, scribed the letters they dictated with his precise, meticulous penmanship. He knows he should be grateful--
(Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth)
But he’s not.
(Blessed still are the strong, for the meek accept their collars.)
At the heart of the matter, Dune is just ashamed... he wonders if it isn’t better to be a starving beggar than a leech fat with rotten blood. But mostly he tries not to feel anything at all-- there’s too much there to untangle, none of it good, and moreover feeling has never put food on the table. He found to maintain sanity it was a constant balancing act: one had to hope for something better, yet one must also accept their place in life. Lean too much into either and you would be lost to disappointment or despair. And he was too much of a survivor for foolish waysides such as those.
Dune shakes his head, tries not to think of his stomach-- which clenches in the dream as though it were empty. It’s not, it hasn’t been in a long time, but starvation, like imprisonment, is not very easily forgotten. The body remembers long after the mind thinks it has found its peace.
“Was it worth it?” The question is sincere. Rationally, (and he is a very rational creature, despite the whimsy of his magic) he thinks the answer is “no”. But he is not sure. This is, after all, a dream, and dreams breed strange truths-- especially when there are shadows.
Speaking of strange truths-- oh no, he’s not the door, although he knows why she might think so. Some night his magic will be strong enough to rip this world apart with the shrug of a shoulder, then sewn back together with the blink of an eye. But not tonight. Likely not for many nights. Tonight the dreamer is not just the door, but the lock; the key too. She is the architect and the guard and the prisoner. She is the crumbling walls and the scent of stale time and all the rest of it. He pities her-- not initially but later, when the light from his forehead that illuminates the ceiling finally fades and the hope in her eyes (the thing with feathers, someone once said) the brilliant, white-fire hope in her eyes, it fades to black.
She straightens, stiffens, and his pity melts away into something almost like resentment. All the freedom, all the power, locked behind walls of her own construction. Gods damn these dreamers and their issues. “Alqarf,” he mimics with sour enthusiasm, like it’s a stupid toast-- to good health or new friends or wandering the bleak expanse of the mind’s prison-- and when she brushes past him he does not immediately follow. He simply looks at all her sharp lines and rigid posture. It carries through even into the way she walks, like starched linens, like someone shoved a stick up somewhere dark. Or maybe it’s just militaristic, he wonders with a thoughtful frown. Picking apart his dreamer and putting her in a box. Or, multiple boxes.
Eventually he trails behind her, but never too far. Dune was a good listener, and anyway the dreamer was far more interesting than her prison. “Where would you rather be right now?” There is a hint of a dare on his tongue. A challenge-- surely she’s not the kind to say no to one of those. “If you could be anywhere in the world?” Perhaps she could take them there, if she focused on it well enough. He has no idea how any of this works, but it's as good a shot as any.
Strutting noisily through her dreams, he almost forgets “I don’t do this. I don’t speak. Not in real life.”
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 lifts her brows sardonically (or, is it wistfully—mercifully, he’ll never know for the way shadow mars the language of her facial features to gibberish) at the word Kings—
In many ways, she was moulded to be a kings-woman from birth.
A guard and a tool—a weapon, extended; thrust and cutting. And so she did. And so she did time and time again. Whether it was her trusty scimitar shedding the stuffing a of training dummies in the Colosseum or piercing between the ribs of an enemy of Soleterra or Leisha. She thrust. And she cut. She loosed souls to the afterlife with light, elegant archs of sun-glistening bronze. And she did it under the banner of a King (and a Queen; especially a Queen) and that was meant, perhaps, to go on for eternity. To go on as long as the kingsline bled into its bloated and gilt river of eminence.
Until there came a king unworthy of it.
Until there came a king, too jealous of their—
They had flown too close to the sun, you see. Touched a god and were found unworthy of it. Were found too lowly to bask in that comfort and divinity; too mortal and far too delicate for that kind of heat. Were held like paragons against the sandy breast of a sun-realm—or so they were told—but were flesh and blood and bone. And mind, too prone to trust and too wanting of their own reprisals. It meant something different to each of them, but each of them thought they had found what they needed to hear on the Traitor’s tongue and look where it had got them.
Look where it had got them.
’Was it worth it?’ She chews her lip, eyes searching methodically in the darkness for that which she knows is not there—a way out; her brothers and sisters in arms; Zayir; Big-Spear and Umma; release; death, life—a strange pantomime, for even she knows that this is a dream. A fleeting thing, a twisted and perverse flight of fancy. She has to wonder what her subconscious is hoping to get out of this charade. Was it closure? Was it understanding? She understood it perfectly well. “Worth it? Hmph. I regret almost everything about what landed me in this hell,” she mutters, low and bitter—words not meant to be said, but kept. “But I never miss a chance for the enemy to show its face.” And show its face it had.
Faces.
Bastards.
So, indeed, they march on in the unhallow and stagnant—deathly, sickly, nauseatingly stagnant—halls of her very own mind-prison! See here, the bones that festoon the dusty corners of this stone mausoleum. There, the urns that hold the ashes of some thousand-year-old-forgotten. A gawping, abeyant—somewhat-equine, more or less—figure, wrapped tightly in yellowed linen and smelling of something deeply unpleasant and alchemical. A crystalline sarcophagus upon a stone plinth; gilt and jewelled and it matters not what kind of pull the dead inside once had, for nobody gives a rat’s shit about them anymore.
Speaking of rats—there are none.
Small mercies.
She listens, and breaths a stifled and secret sigh of relief when he finally follows. Traitorous chimaera or no, he’s better company than her own thoughts. And besides, she knows how this story arch goes:
First, she is here. Just is. What comes before is far-away and irrelevant to what comes next;
Then, she screams. She screams for her Arete comrades. She screams for Zayir. She screams for her mother and father. She screams in pain and anger and those throes go on for days.
And then, she becomes silent, because nothing answers back but the corrupt reverb of her own voice. And besides, her throat begins to ache.
Then, she searches. She marches. She patrols, endlessly, through these labyrinthine halls until she thinks she finally remembers her way around—
And then, she mind begins to unravel. She is thirsty. Her voice feels like purple claws in her mouth. Her brain is like carnation-red silk, soft and sanguine. Her feet leave tattoos of holy-women, bare-breasted and semi-alive on the pearly floor.
Stone talks with mouths like many fingertips.
Sand washes the soft cotton memories of babes.
The sun touches endless crystalline nests.
The last chapter is the real damnation.
When he offers his challenge, she huffs irritably under her breath, a tone that says, ‘face it, we have been consigned to darkness—get comfortable’ but she supposes it costs her nothing to play along. Her eyes waver to the glints of dull gold and bronze that the firelight catches—urns and tithes—losing their characteristic focus. Is it the bight of the Oasis, where her and Zayir played and argued? The gardens of Lady Arisetta, where she tumbled and bruised her knees as a girl (Umma would kiss the scrapes and tell her to harden up in the same breath)? Those all seemed too personal. Too close. So instead, she fishes for memories of her young adulthood, spent abroad.
The world around her seems stiff. Resistant. It rebels against her brain, growing darker, fires sputtering and hissing clear consternation—but along the stale air comes the faintest whiff of jasmine and pomegranate; ale and wine. Her brows knit together as she turns a corner, instinctively, though she cannot, on thinking back, recall if that passageway has ever been there before...
She glances back at Dune, eyeing the make and measure of him, like a general would their rows upon rows of soldiers. In time, she snorts softly and dispenses with the reticence, “You do not feel like anything I would come up with,” her deep, hard eyes narrow for a second, examining the curves and valleys of him, of this lucid walker. She tries to picture some man or woman she might have bedded, or killed; someone she may have run into on the streets. Something to elicit such a powerful and life-like reimagining.
But he does not ring a bell.
“I cannot imagine you would want to be in here with me so. Grave mistake, was it?” They wander on, but as they do, the redolence of some far-away kingdom grows stronger, and in the echoing halls of her dreams, the sound of chatter and laughter and clinking earthware hum like ghosts.
It seemed to Dune that life was suffering, no matter one’s station, and in the dull waking hours as he trudged through whatever tedious task was at hand that day, he often wondered what meaning was to be found in any of it. Take the dreamer, soaked in shadows: the march of her step, the veiled look in her eyes. He can feel, in the very fabric of this oppressive dream, that she has suffered for a very long time. And for what?
No one deserved this.
Well, maybe it begs the question was there something more to what she did, something beyond pouting?, and he almost asks but--
No, no one deserved this... this imprisonment. No matter what. Still, life carried on, apathetic to all the shit it stirred up, each year twice as heavy as the last. And then it came to an end, sometimes abruptly, sometimes slow and drawn out; sometimes clean, usually messy. He wanted to believe there was some greater purpose, some way to rise above the suffering, but most days he did not have the energy for faith.
Then she speaks of regret, and he wonders… maybe it was as simple as balancing your suffering, bargaining with it. Biding your time until the enemy showed its face. Maybe life was a waiting game-- if you really wanted to win at it-- but he finds that thought depressing, and promptly leaves it in the shadows behind them.
It is not a companionable silence between them, but neither is it uncomfortable. Eventually she says: “You do not feel like anything I would come up with,” and the dream turns its attention to Dune. A hundred invisible eyes slowly turn to look. A hundred invisible knives turn to point. A nervous shiver creeps down his spine, and to his surprise it’s not entirely unpleasant. He’s not usually noticed; it brings a strange kind of enjoyment...
He realizes-- It can be nice to be seen.
And-- it can be nice to be heard, too. Perhaps I should do more of this, speaking and being seen. Out there, on the other side.
This feeling of niceness is surreal. The boy is too used to cruel streets, hungry nights, violent landscapes; the brutal grind of poverty. He is used to anonymity and silence. Then he glances at the dreamer, backlit by a smear of dirty torchlight, just as she glances at him in a way he deems judgemental and detached, like looking over a rack of weapons for sale at the market. And the situation suddenly strikes him as hilarious. He’d bet his meager life savings that nobody has ever met this woman, in either the waking or dream world, and thought “this is nice.”
He can’t hold it in anymore. Dune cackles, a boyish and birdlike sound that rings brightly across the shadowed hallways. It feels forbidden here. He doesn’t care. “No, I wouldn’t. I’m Dune,” he says, and resists adding smartly “you know, like a pile of sand?” Too stupid. Instead he subtly dips his head in introduction. “From the low quarter.” Could someone be proud to be from such a place? Yes, of course-- and, to prove it, a prickly sort of pride fills his voice. Defensive already, imagining how the way she sees him might change.
But home is home.
And home, for Dune, would always be home. Win a million signos and he’d still live there among all that poverty and despair. The colors were so much brighter when held in contrast to all the dirt. Anyway he’d never have that much coin-- he’d give it away first, or (more likely) spend it on something stupid. Dune the Loon, sometimes the cruel nickname was so fitting... or at the very least, it suited him more than prosperity.
“I cannot imagine you would want to be in here with me so. Grave mistake, was it?”
Dune likes her dry tone of voice, her manner of speaking rough and familiar as sandpaper. It makes him feel like he is not held in any esteem, which is both familiar and comforting. There was nothing to lose, that way. (Whereas when a beautiful stranger weaves you a gilded crown, flies with you across the stars, and on the brink of waking tells you to find her… well that had been a lot of pressure on his young shoulders. He still thinks of her, that dreamer. Hhe still wonders...)
He smiles broadly-- the look says yes-- but his words diverge from the expression. “Mmm, not quite mistake.” He muses on the word, mistake, and all its wrongness. “It was an accident. There’s a difference, no?” The question is asked with an almost laughable sincerity-- although if she were to laugh, he would be deeply offended. Street children like him did not learn frivolous things like vocabulary. What would be the point? That had not kept him from slowly learning to read, and even-- his latest endeavor-- to write. But these things had taken time, and they had come to him much later in life than they would have if he was born to the middle or upper class.
All this to say the distinction between mistake and accident, though minor, was deeply important to him. It was this attention to detail, he knew, which would one day unlock doors which a younger Dune did not even have the imagination to dream of. (And then one day he began to walk through the dreams of others, which were even grander and wilder than his own, and he learned to dream bigger.)
As they walk the dream begins to gently change. He tries not to pay it any attention-- some dreams, if not their dreamers, had something akin to stage fright. But the air is slowly becoming easier to breathe, almost fragrant, and it puts a little extra spring in his step. He wants to go there, to the place promised by that sweet breeze, where goblets chimed and it was not forbidden to laugh. He very carefully does not allow himself to press her into going there. She knows the way better than him, anyway. The dreamer always does.
“So do you always wear a collar, or--” the words trail off as he glances at the shadowed ceilings, then the ever-burning torches. Or is that another part of all this?
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 had done everything in her power to barter with the misery, to eke out from life what pleasures she could between the bloodshed and the raw moments afterwards… those hot, sticky, coppery moments; coalesced into one faceless thing, donned in a hundred pairs of insensate eyes and hundred blue tongues, lolling. If one can imagine: Everything surrounding seems to quiet, to disappear into a shapeless whirl of life beyond the sill at which she stands, marvelling at, and sickened by, the pantomime of godhood. That’s what taking a life is, really, at the end of the day, isn’t it? To mime the ordained power of the divine ‒ to wield the purloined scales of judgement and finality, so uncouth in mortal hands.
She hadn’t made peace with any of it, but she had found small ways to make it all go away, and if that’s the closest she ever comes to absolution, to freedom, so be it.
Nor, indeed, is she meant to be forgiven ‒ not meant to be pitied in the quiet way that he does now, taking in the enormity of that ill-begotten punishment ‒ she may not have earned this cryptic existence… but then again, maybe she had, in a way, for sins gone unpaid. It had simply been a happy coincidence. Long Like the King.
Not that she believes any of that. Those dizzying height of self-awareness exists in the centre of her labyrinthian arrogance and anger, glowing softly as a holy grail might, far too pleased with itself. No. It had not been more than pouting ‒ not from her perspective ‒ at least, not as far as Zolin goes, and if she could have, she would have stood at the margin of life and death with him and revelled as she played numen of carnage once again.
She really only has herself to blame. Not that she would say otherwise. That level of self-awareness is perfectly accessible..
He’s right, though, life is about suffering between the small mercies.
He’s right, too, that it’s a bloody grim train of thought.
As they walk, the world becomes a little less dark, a little less stagnant ‒ so gradually, that it is almost imperceptible, except that nothing in that choking underworld can ever go wholly unnoticed. The way the dream mutates does not feel like a shift to her, but a phase ‒ like night bleeding into dusk. She sees it, recognizes it with a cocked head, but the exact moment things begin to unweave she cannot quite put her finger on. Perhaps the lucid walker experiences otherwise, her mind holding onto him in unsteady, increasingly suspicious hands.
But the sputtering braziers throw less splaying flamelight, and a more consistent ambience basks the intricate details of the ceiling into sight. They are engraved with images of life and death; gods and mortals. Now and then, a beam of wood, so out of place in the necropolis, spans wall-to-wall.
The passage-that-was-never, too, becomes wider, and the darkened rooms that split off from it are filled with heaps of vaguely equine shapes, dented, dull helms rolling down them with sharp clattering. Strange flags wave windlessly at the precipices, piercing through the bodies like claimed earth. These tableaus in-between, she offers only cursory, vapid glance, a look that says, not this again, and nothing more.
The walker cackles and Cyrra turns her sharp gaze on him, brow cocked. It echoes, inelegant and unwanted in this place, but where it lands, it seems to burn holes in the fabric of the dream, pinpoints of sunlight slanting through, elaborating motes of dust. Dune, from the low quarter, the Viper Slayer plays with anger, annoyance, and interest, in equal measure. She would never admit it ‒ like he rebukes his joy in being noticed‒ but she receives his presence gladly. As gladly as she can. So that he is here at all, somehow, is immaterial; the how is what sticks like a thorn. “Dune, from the low quarter,” the mockery he waits for never comes ‒ it has never meant much to her, which is rich coming from someone who grew up in the Queen’s gardens; but an Arete had always been an Arete, no matter their origins. “Cyrra.”
The sound of voices grows louder ‒ the clinking of mugs, the sound of oud strings and tabla percussion. Cyrra seems not to notice at all, her ears turned back to him, grunting, “accident. Minor difference, from my perspective.” The words lack enough venom to be dangerous but are hard enough to be chastizing.
Her mind has always been a guarded palace.
“How do you you opps into someone elses’ mind?”
It is, after some moments walking, that they ‒ dreamer and walker ‒ come to a door, light limning the cracks around its frame. She considers it ‒ the intricate girih patterns etched in the wood, the brass handle, shaped like a hooding snake. ‘So do you always wear a collar, or-’ Cheeky. Her lip twitches, pulse quickening in her ears. “Al Miqyas Aldhahab,” Had he not challenged her? This is what she came come up with?
Well, it’s no flight through the cosmos, but, ce la vie.
She moves to press her nose against the door and it opens at the slightest brush. The light that streams in is blinding, like stepping out at first sun-up, but Cyrra moves into it greedily, the dry warmth of that place like a lover’s touch. “It’s not a collar,” she blinks, slowly letting the scene emerge from the wash of white. A tavern, with brightly coloured, geometric patterns on the walls; vibrant, aromatic smoke curls up to the wooden beams above from circles of huddled heads and the air smells like wine, ale, jasmine blooms and spice.
“...it’s a… long story…”
She smirks.
Somewhere, beneath the din of laughter and conversation, two, slightly slurred, coquettish voices surface, rippled versions of themselves ‒ ‘they call me the Viper Slayer, where I come from...’
‘...oh, aye? Well... I have a Viper needs Slaying…’
It isn’t a long story, at all, actually. It is an interminably embarrassing one. “I met a metalworker in this place. He made it for me.” She turns her head, craning over the patrons with their fluted, golden cups and elaborate, flowing cloaks, to where she knows she should be sitting, flushed and too close to the hale Leishan. But there is only an inchoate shade, like an imprinted presence. “Do you drink in dreams?” she turns to him, “If you don’t, this is a good place to start.” She doesn’t bother to ask him if he can drink here at all, or if those kinds of pleasures are denied a walker. She can, she’s dreamed of wine many-a nights.
She mutters something to a server passing by in a lilting, melodic tongue. The pretty girl with kohl-lined eyes nods her head and sways away, the golden coins that hem her scarf jingling. She returns with two cups. Cyrra takes one in her mind’s grasp and raises it, before bringing it to her lips, “to your health, Dune.” The other sits expectantly on its tray.
“Cyrra,” the boy chirps, like a parrot in more than one way. At first he doesn’t think the name suits her. Something about it is a little too soft, feminine. Too… simple? The two syllables sink deeper, repeated internally like a chant: Cyrra,
Cyrra,
Cyr
ra,
and within a minute the name seems so wholly, indisputably hers that he could not imagine any combination of letters better suited to the dun.
Funny how that happens.
He’s still thinking of her name when the dream begins to shift, shyly, like a flower that did not wish to be seen in the middle of blooming. It’s all easy to ignore, for the most part, and his stride never breaks from the self-assured sway he began walking with. The change in light and scent and atmosphere is more than welcome, but he does not give it more than passing attention, and he certainly does not mention it to the dreamer.
“Accident. Minor difference, from my perspective,” she says with a harshness that slides right off his dark brown skin. His cheeky smile says but you agree there is a difference before her next question sprouts, and his expression twists into a thoughtful frown.
“Magic, I think.” It was not necessarily an obvious answer, but what else could this possibly be? Some kind of shared insanity? “I’m apparently not very good at it.” He flashes a toothy grin, shoulders shrugging oh well. He doesn’t say how much better he is at the dreaming than a year ago, how now he can grow dragon wings, or turn his blood to brightly-glowing liquid that shines through the skin, or shrink to the size of a mouse. Every night he grows stronger. The excessive display of magic will cause him to wake with a splitting headache that lingers for hours, but each time is easier than the last.
There is no teacher for this sort of thing, or if there is Dune does not have the resources to afford it. He learns by trial and error, grows through pain and failure. He’s no stranger to hard work, which is what it all boils down to: hard work and dedication. It was exhausting and exhilarating in equal measure.
The rewards of his magic were tragically not yet tangible, but in his waking hours he spent much of his free time thinking up some scheme to materially benefit from the Dream. He had a few burgeoning ideas, but they would require greater mastery of his magic first… So he put his head down and kept at it, night after night. Except tonight, which he planned to savor with deep, restful sleep to prepare for tomorrow’s travels.
All this to say: a happy coincidence, indeed, that he ended up here, of all places, particularly on a night in which he did not want to be Dreaming at all. Happy happy happy.
But oh, it gets better.
There’s alcohol.
He smells it before he sees the pretty cups and hears the overlapping voices in various stages of inebriation. “They call me the viper slayer…” rises from the din, familiar in a way that almost makes him stop-- almost. “Doesn’t seem like a long story,” he notes, and before he can complain he is distracted by… well, by her face as she turns to face him. It feels like he’s spent hours looking at her from a step behind and to the side. He’s practically memorizes the purse of her lips and the proud curl of her jaw and her lashes, such lovely lashes. Unlike most girls they never fluttered, though that likely said more about him than her. He blinks dumbly.
Does he drink? “Of course.” He snorts. (rude, in a place like this-- there are some dirty glares) “It’s free.”
“To your health, Dune.” Is she being sarcastic? He can’t tell if she’s being sarcastic. Ah, well. “Fe Sahatek,” he swirls the drink in his fluted cup (it’s gold, he’s never held one like this in real life) then knocks it back without even noticing the pretty girl who winks. His eyes are on Cyrra, partly because he does not entirely trust her but also because he has no desire to look away. In truth, he finds the dreamer mystifying. Puzzling, in an addictive kind of way. Also vaguely intimidating, although the effect of this particular characteristic would be tenfold in reality-- the dream obviously lacking in consequence, corporeal or otherwise.
Dune was the sort to take interest in the broken and discarded, but she did not seem to be either of these things. She offered a challenge of a different sort, and he was intrigued. It lit up all his senses, which strained for any clue she might drop, a peek behind the curtain, so to speak. But enough of looking. Far away (and yet-- right here, beneath the veneer of the dream) his body is slowly becoming aware of time. The blush of first light, however faint and far away, presses against closed eyelids with a kiss. A summoning, a stirring. Of course, it happens as soon as the setting becomes comfortable. Just his luck.
“Sunrise soon,” he comments, gaze shifting away for just a moment to summon another round with a beckoning gesture and his most becoming smile. Quickly now, while there’s still time. He finally notices the pretty server, who warms his smile even more, but his attention inevitably returns to Cyrra. "How have I never seen you before? I'm sure I would have remembered..." someone like you. It could not be chalked up solely to Dune being from the low quarter-- work took him to all corners of the court. And she was undeniably Solterran, although he couldn't exactly place her particular accent. His best bet is that she is some kind of warrior princess, hidden away for some stupid reason or another.
The next round of drinks arrive in those decadent fluted glasses. Dune raises his glass, watching the light glow golden on its surface. "To escaping that shithole we started in. Well done." He smiles tartly, and drinks.
D U N E
@Cyrra god I love her so much <3 next post Dune will wake up! ;_;
