little pilgrim
the Indian's axed your scalp.
the Indian's axed your scalp.
He stands in a beam of light that makes his skin gleam like a dead star. The sunlight pours in from a dome of glass in the ceiling, placed so that Solis’ light might ever anoint the sitting sovereign; dust motes hang suspended in its shaft.
If the sun were truly the light of Solis, she thinks, that shaft of light would become a spear. What was the history of Solterra if it was not smiting, if it was not vengeance? So much red blood has been spilled on the desert’s sand - perhaps that is why nothing grows. A thousand years of death has salted the ground. Elif tells herself that Raum is nothing new.
Oh, but she does not quite believe it. His cool eyes do not waver when she lashes him with her tongue; she thinks of standing fast before the bay man’s griffin and straightens her shoulders a little more. Her thin tail snaps behind her, the only betrayal of her livewire nerves save for how wide her eyes are, how bright they shine.
She does not know what she expects, other than punishment. It is not to be answered so softly that the robust beat of her heart nearly drowns out the words. When he begins to move, her nostrils flare and her skin shivers as though it is a lion before her and not a man, but still the girl gives no ground; instead she shakes out her wings, feels the feathers brush along her dappled ribs. She tries to time her heart to beat with each fall of his feet on tile but it will not stop racing, running ahead of her, begging her to act. Elif is not a girl good at waiting.
And then he is upon her. For a moment, with her neck arched like a knowing cobra and his fine-boned face only inches from her own, she thinks she should strike. Oh, she is not so foolish to think she could land a fatal blow, but even to draw blood from the thin skin of his nose might be enough, each drop more precious to her than a ruby.
But then he turns black, darker than all the shadows in Solterra. Solis does not love him, she thinks, even as fear makes her tense like a hare below an eagle’s shadow, and I cannot fight if I am dead. The only way away from his eyes is to close her own, and she does, and swallows, and feels her throat tighten against her alaja. Elif recites all the prayers and blessings written there, and when her eyes open again her expression is as brash and challenging as a drawn blade.
“Come now, king,” she says, unwilling to sully her mouth with his name. His use of her own only lays a smile curved like a scimitar along her dark lips. Has she not always wanted to be known? “You are no fool, you know Solterra’s history. We have been asked to break so many times. But the will of this people is a blade, and if you think to shatter it then you should know the heat of our blood and our god will only forge it into something new, and better-suited for killing.”
She has never thought herself a talker - Elif has ever preferred to react to her conflicts with hooves and wings and teeth - but now her tongue serves her where the rest of her body cannot. Though she is smaller than him, she does not feel it now; she leans forward, she resettles her wings again and the red feathers along her shoulders look like old blood.
“What makes you think you will succeed when each before you has failed?”
@Raum
