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She remembers everything in painstaking detail. Everything.
Her brain is carefully compartmentalized and organized to store the photographs of her impeccable memory. The minuscule details of lesser relevance and importance do tend to fade over time but they are always stored and readily accessible should she ever wish to recall a certain face, a certain environment, a certain sentence spoken two years ago.
She memorizes Raum in this way. She memorizes every detail; not matter how relevant or irrelevant it may seem at the time. She searches for a crack, anything that might tell her more than he intends to reveal, anything that might help her survive. But he has dead gray eyes and she can only assume that his heart, too, is dead. Hoping otherwise would be foolish. She has made that mistake once before and paid dearly for it; they all did. A kingdom had burned in the wake of their poor, empathetic judgement.
People can only be what they are, not what you want them to be.
No.
He turns away from her, smoothly, his face bland and void of emotion as if she is inconsequential as a fly buzzing in his ear.
He pauses, just so. Something has changed his mind. An ear tilts her way. His eyes find hers again. This time he does not look through her. This time his gaze is as relentless, as if she is being crushed between a silver vice. She finds that she cannot look away and despite the fact that she struggles to breathe beneath the weight of those dead eyes, she holds. She does not look away. She holds. She wants to look, wants to discover what lies in the depths of those eyes that no one else on board will meet. What will she see if she looks?
As she holds his gaze her necklace begins to pulse with steady warmth, like an ember flickering to life in a steady breeze. The spell is broken—she is no longer a prisoner drowning in the soulless depths of his dead eyes. Instead she beholds him with renewed interest and mild surprise, as if she knows something he doesn’t.
The boat shifts and the floorboards creak and moan under the strain of something immense; she is rent entirely free form the suffocation of his unyielding gaze. Basilisk. The name of the creature comes to her immediately even though she has never seen one before. She has read about them and Erebos occasionally spoke of those he had met in the Other World. It is a regal creature and a curious mix of midnight scales and feathers the color of a blood-red dawn. The blindfold binds the creature tightly, unmercifully. She wonders if he might be a prisoner, too.
A murmur of fear rises like a wave from the smugglers on board as the basilisk screeches his fury, his wrath, his pain. Her nostrils flare and wrinkle; there is the distinct, acrid stench of urine in the air. Yellow piss runs down the cracks of the floorboards beneath her cloven hooves. She glances around, frowning in distaste; but somehow finds a sliver of empathy when she sees how young the boy is and how all color is drained from the soft planes of his face. She does not blame him for losing control of his bladder in the presence of a creature from nightmares.
She supposes she ought to be afraid as the wooden clad deck turns to stone and as the ship begins to creak and groan as sea water spills over the side. She ought to feel something, anything as she faces her doom, her death, as the ship gurgles and drowns beneath her hooves. She thinks of Erebos and wonders what fate he has met in the Rift. She had hoped they would meet again before her time was up.
The young man who had wet himself begins to weep uncontrollably like a child.
The only thing she can really think is: how ironic. First she had been condemned to burn by wicked, weak men and now she is condemned to drown in the sea by a man with dead, dead, dead eyes. The eyes of a walking corpse. What can possibly drive a man as far gone as this?
Bring the girl, she hears. Then: The rest can remain.
The silver man with dead eyes and his blind-folded creature are gone. The guards in black armor escort her off the ship. Her chains chafe and bruise her ankles. She looks back as she is jostled along, searching desperately for the young man. Her daughter would be about the same age now, she thinks absentmindedly. But he is lost in the chaos of the sinking stone ship. His cries are swallowed and overwhelmed by the wails of dying, drowning men.
Polyxena does not look back again.
P O L Y X E N A
oh, I drain your life 'til there's
nothing left but your blood shot eyes
oh, I take my time 'til I show you how I feel inside
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03-28-2019, 11:53 PM
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