i've lost the parts of me that make me whole
The sand covered streets are huge and wide before her, stretching on endlessly. The sandstone buildings reach high, high, high into the sky, stretching toward the sun above. Everything is too big and too far. She walks but the sunlit road in front of her never gets any closer. She walks, but the buildings at her side never seem to change. Everything is too big.
She stops, and her legs are shaking and she can’t seem to stop them. They wobble like she doesn’t know how to use them and her skin is stretched too tightly over her ribs and her breathing is ragged. Something hot and warm falls onto her cheek, carving a path down the rose of her skin. Then more, one after the other, until soon it is a cascade. Her mouth opens as if calling for help but no sound comes out. It is quiet except for the rapid, hummingbird beat of her heart and the sound of her dying breaths in her ears.
Dying?
A shadow blocks out the sun, and the man it belongs to is too tall. The darkness cast by his form falls over her, consuming her. She looks up and sees a seraph (or a monster?) wearing a gilded crown. She falls into the black pit of his eyes, empty and suffocating. She falls, and falls, and then there is no more endless street, no more buildings stretching high above her. Her knees do not wobble but her bones, they ache. There is no more her. There is just the barren spaces created inside her, waiting to be filled. She is hollowed out. Who is she? Who is she?
Who is she?
She no longer remembers.
Somewhere through the darkness, somewhere out there, there is the feel of cool metal against her flesh, tight and binding. There is a snapping sound, like a clasp being done; slipping into place. Locking—not tight, not with a key or a spell, but it is like the door of a cell sliding closed. Echoing, shattering. Final.
Teiran wakes up, and the world is dark and quiet. There is a sheen to her skin, hot and uncomfortable, and her heart beats too quickly and there is something, a thought, a memory, slipping away into the unreachable corridors of her mind. She does not go after it. The girl stands and her legs do not wobble and her bones do not ache but there is something in her eyes. Something haunted, just beneath the veneer of cold steel. In the dark she slips on a hood, white as the moon, and for comfort straps two daggers to her sides.
The streets are filled with blood and screams and fire when she enters them. Smoke soars high into the air, blotting out the sky for miles. There is no sky, only blackness. Empty and suffocating. The screams echo strangely, as if down a long tunnel, full of pain and agony. The fire is bright and hot against her already too-hot skin but somehow it does not burn when it brushes its fingers across her body. Teiran turns away from it, from the ringing in her ears and the sound of glass cracking under pressure.
She needs to get out of here, and she slips through alleyways and finds herself in the desert. Teiran stops, stands rigid against the sand around her. She looks back. There is no fire, no smoke, no screams. She turns and walks away. A breeze stirs the sands, and she moves like a ghost: leaving no trace, making no sound. Teiran walks without thinking about where she is going. She walks, with the stars shining in the open sky and her sage green eyes looking but not seeing.
At some point, her hooves hit solid stone, and when she looks up she realizes she has walked to the canyon and stands on the threshold of the Colosseum. It is not her first time here, and surely it will not be her last. She doesn’t think of all the other times. Not of when it had appeared as if placed by Solis’ hand, of finding a girl made of strawberries and cream, of confronting a titan with a heart surrounded by teeth.
There are cracks in her surface as she enters, and a shivering passes over her skin, wild and unbidden. She doesn’t see the man standing there in the middle of the ring at first, made of mahogany and ivory. Even when she does, she doesn’t pull her knife like she usually might, for security. For safety. For warning. She peers at him out from under a golden trimmed hood and, after a moment, realizes she recognizes him if only just.
The sight of him makes her think of cold and snow and boiling tempers. The sight of him makes her think of smoke and fire and screams and she isn’t sure why, when they hadn’t been there at all. Not this time. “You.” It is all she says, whether or not it is enough. Whether or not he, too, will recognize her.
@Jahin
