As he arrives at the walls of the Day Court, a sigh lifts from him like smoke. It is arid relief, something warm that mingles in the hot air and begs for shade. The sun is high now, high over him and the walls, the palace in the distance whose spire glimmers as it peeks from over the ridge. Sweat beads on his back, hangs like dew drops from the golden twine that sags over his mane in drooping rich cobwebs. As he raises his head the corvus skull chatters against his neck, rattling against the badger jaw and bird bones, all tousled in a breeze that is far too brief. He was born to the dry air – gasping and wheezing and begging for a soft breath in the brushland dust – but this was different. This was cloying, near suffocating. The desert sand sprayed with each gust and caught on his tongue until it was rasp and spittle, more gristle than muscle. Even in the winter Solterra offered no mercy. And yet, it was a spectacle. His eyes roved the stone walls turned gold with a touch of the sun, crept along the crags and fine lines that could hardly fit a hair between the bricks.
Here, the shadows shrunk beneath him. They gathered in a small, rounded silhouette that hunched back from the sight of the sun, writhing and hissing in a pool of greyed sand that slithered about his hooves. The daylight bore upon him like a vengeful god, and he could not but help to loathe the place entirely on this initiation. He felt as though even the night here was unwelcome, and it could not have served him any better to return then.
No, this was now.
Here in the merciless hot pit of monsters and death and otherwise unwarranted peril – his path was here, it was stead, it rolled out before him like a carpet unraveling at the fringes. The sun ticked over him like a damocles curse, and it grinned for his scorn. And in its challenge, he found promise. He strove again, wandering along the curves of the mammothian wall, uncertain of where their gates lied and who stood at them waiting for him with polished spears. This would not be simple. Though he doubted he smelled anymore of the incensed markets of Denocte or the heavy cologne that lingered in the Scarab, he couldn't guarantee that it was any less obvious where he had spent a year. These days lost in Solterra were just that – days, and while he smelled of the red canyon rock and antelope furs and teryr blood, devils knew one another outside of hell, and Raum was no exception. So was his pursuit straight for the throat, as always. With teeth and irons and bruises and knives – knives – what good was a warrior with no weapon? Useless here except for cunning and courage, which at times he wondered if they were just masks for foolishness.
Each footprint stirred sand from its resting place, sifted through each labored step as the grains burned along the scrapes on his legs. The walls seemed to stretch on endlessly, and to which corner he could not devise worth wandering, every glimpse of the future was wavering in the rippling likeness of empty miles. All gold, all dancing on the horizon with the pretense of eternity (like taunting daylight tip-toeing the edge of wealth, a chance of glory on the sharp of a blade). He considered stopping a time or two, turning back and heading home with empty hands – how often did he do this? He could not remember when it was last – but the whispers that told him to do so were too willful, too arrogant not to disobey.
And then he saw it – silhouettes that broke the dancing, uncertain line between sky and sand. They fell out of the wall like crumbling bricks, hesitant and animate as they turned back to the sunlit city then scurried south. Riches, rags. They ran as if they had stolen the eye from a king. Erasmus narrowed his eyes to watch them pass over the sand, not even stopping as they spared a second to observe his shadow in the golden hot terrace. He strained to see their faces. To see if it was fear, depravity, and wondered if they even existed at all.
They dropped something as they ran and he picked his pace from a fast walk to a trot that lumbered over the soft, heaving sands. As they disappeared into the southern gold that descended into distant red, his trot moved to a canter. Perhaps he had lost his mind. Dehydrated and overheated, running was the last thing his instincts would beg of him – and they now screamed out to him like a chiding parent. His blood boiled, raking his veins with razor teeth. How dare you. But he was gone to the wares of a sensible man – he was a boy, curious and flighted to the conception of mortal blood from the golden stone. How could it? How could stone birth flesh? Was his mother right? Was he a stone that fell from a god's eye and grew like roots in the belly of a hungry serpent?
Even curiouser, the sand glimmered with a pearlescent sheen that scowled at him from a distance now.
It broke the monotony of gold and tan and heavy hot sunlight.
It was diamonds. Hundreds. Thousands.
They did not pour from the wall but pooled as if they were a stream, a river of diamonds that fell from the wall like the bricks had been encumbered with such pressure that they split into a thousand little jewels. They spread like veins through the sand, he could see them from afar – they resembled a tributary of glistening silvery waters spilled from the sun. They did not break through the wall no, they were the wall, and now they weren't – Isra.
As he came upon them now he slowed and ran his eyes over the wealth. He remembered the way she shifted the ground beneath her. Pearls. Gold. Cinder. The way she dripped rubies and silk from a door made of mausoleum stone, an effortless press of magic that spun riches from the air. He remembered now. His eyes rose to the sky and searched out seaweed scales, serpentine shadows. There was nothing. How long was this here? How long had it been since Isra had wove her magic into the stone, and ripped from it the most precious thing it could be? Who had seen?
He crept forward, his shadow lunging from beneath him to pry at the diamonds and their glistening grins, with a grin of its own. It rustled within him, hearty and pleased. But his eyes were trained on the crater that was made, a crater that still dripped here and there with gemstones that seemed conceived right from the mortar. It resembled a geode, and he admired it as he took careful steps to its maw.
One.
Two. The breeze stirred, a couple more plopchinkchink from the diamond-studded wall.
Three.
Four.
Five. He misstepped, a diamond slid from under his hoof and he caught himself quick, pausing.
Listen.
. . . Nothing. Five more steps.
Six.
Seven.
Eig-
A muzzle popped through the geode crater, and Erasmus froze in his steps. First a nose, then slid out a forehead, wide eyes beneath a bushy forelock whose gaze crept in awe over the tumbled riches. That was, until it fell upon the looming silhouette that was Erasmus. He was midstep, neck arched and shoulders low like a prowling wolf. And as their eyes met, one met like a hawk and the other like a timid mouse. Before a word could leap from his mouth, the stranger was gone. He closed the distance quickly now, no use for stealth when the thing would surely alarm the first soul it found to the wall that crumbled to diamonds and the dark man who stood at its border. He broke through it and took an immediate right, stole away into a path that promised the least resistance. There, somewhere in the distance there that he closed swift as flight, he found an alleyway that threw a shadow over him. The first trace of mercy that bid him any welcome. His bones eased, his blood ceased its boiling raze and lounged comfortably, soaking deeply the dark that tread over his spine like a cool bath.
He waited until he heard nothing, and then he moved on. There, the man possessed of gold veined granite slid from the alleyway and into the quiet of a village tensed with something he could not quite understand. But he sought it anyways, his ears upright and forward, open to every whisper and baited breath that tailed the breeze. Anything of quicksilver and blue, anything of Raum, anything that dared breathe of the villain king of Solterra.
@Raum
