[AW] City of Stone

[Raum]

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

  


There is a song in Solterra this day.


It is the seraphic note of an arrow as it cuts hair in its drive toward Isra’s target. Raum hears nothing but that song, high above his laughter and louder than the dragon that roars and the basilisk that screams its answer.


He is bowed low as he listens to that arrow calling for his death. He hears it come beautiful and final, arcing her way through the sky toward his heart. Raum wants to welcome it. He wants to lift his chin and bear his chest and feel what death is like as it slips out along an arrow shaft and down the curve of his breast.


But this is no ordinary arrow. This is one loosed by the Night Court Queen who he is never meant to kill. And in this moment he decrees they are not meant to kill each other. In this moment of singing arrows and crying monsters Raum decrees that his death is for none but he.


Beside him Legion is watching a dragon swooping down upon him. The basilisk is watching how the dragon’s jaws part like the heavens and between them line teeth that each scream for his blood. His own jaws part, his tail switching this way and that. Stone statues shatter to dust upon its strike, but Legion has no concerns for the dead, not when adversity comes sweeping out of the sky.


His jaws part to meet his descending retribution, he squats ready and savage, a perfect match for a sea-dragon. But a call breaks through his defense. It is his name called fierce and loud and indomitably. He cannot resist, he cannot disobey, not with the ties that bind him to the Solterran king. Legion turns to his master, desperation bubbling in his blood for there is a monster descending with his death between its jaws and his master has just made him defenseless.


Crimson basilisk eyes meet the electric blue of a dictator king. Raum feels the weight of that red gaze, it is heavy upon his limbs his chest, his throat his neck. That heaviness builds like crushing stone, it seeps through his blood and renders him still, it reaches for his lips his teeth his nose his cheeks, all of them turn to stone and Raum has no breath to draw in through ribs and airways that are now just ridges and tunnels of stone. That weight, oh that weight seeps in toward his heart (for his heart is not the last thing to be turned into stone… no, not when he has still to remember all that he has done and all that he has lost).


And so he does. In that final moment where his heart is stone and blindness takes away the red of those monstrous eyes and the avenging look of a Queen with death on her agenda… in that final moment is only the fleeting, warming and completing, memory of the smile of a sun-drenched crimson girl at the birth of their daughter. And his daughter, oh his daughter with her ice blue eyes, wide and newborn, that have not yet learned of all the ways her father is a monster.


Legion lives on, for but a while. It is long enough to see his master turned to stone and stood as if tranquil, as if at peace with all he has done (was he ever not?). As Raum’s death comes swift and sudden and heavy as stone, Legion feels the ripping snap of their bond breaking. He feels the freedom, the return of his will. It is swift and it is blistering and it is enough to make him forget the dragon descending whose jaws latch about his throat. He tumbles to the floor with blood spilling in his beak. The basilisk snaps at the dragon, his fangs laced with poison and ire. His taloned feet draw under him to gouge out a dragon’s belly. Legion pushes and scrabbles himself clear but that electric breath of freedom has already gone for now he can taste how death is seeping through his body and it is not from a dragon’s bite across his throat. 


No, as the bond between Raum and his beast was ripped from them both, it pulled away like the sting from a bee. It left the basilisk mortally wounded. His wings flare and the beast screams at the dragon to stay down as it leaps into the air. It flies dipping and weaving as life seeps from him with every second. Legion flies low and weak, but high enough to escape the walls of Solterra, high enough to remember what freedom was like, high enough to taste the purer air...


And then he is sinking upon the horizon, as if one of Isra’s arrows has felled him there. Legion falls, free at last, into death.

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@Isra, @Eik @Seraphina @Ipomoea @Bastogne