my mother, has promised me
the mirage of a boat, a vehicle
of water within the water,
and my soul would return from
the trials of its human state,
from the long siege, from the
struggling companions upon the plain,
from the burning towers and deeds
of honor and dishonor,
Some days he wanders down the long stretch of the catacombs main hallway, into the strange tunnels beyond. He has found many things beyond the crypts, from crystal sarcophagi to half-dreamed monsters. And maybe even this wandering is a dream; maybe even this wandering is an endless day in which he never truly sleeps and never truly wakes. Even now Zayir is outside his own body, it seems; even now he is not sure if he is walking and waking, or asleep and dead.
In all his worship, in all he was ever told of Solis, he did not think the sun god’s afterlife would be so dark. He supposes—and he must have thought this thought every minute of every hour of an eternity—the opposite of light is darkness and, anyway, the lights had all gone out long ago. Sometimes there is a strange bioluminescence that pulsates through the cavern walls and across old tombs; Zayir cannot explain it. Instead, it seems to be magical. Or bacterial, one of the other Arete—a skilled medic—once scoffed. Zayir does not know where they are now.
Maybe Zayir dreamed that, too?
There is a shaking in the dark. A great and terrible cracking.
He moves, he thinks. Or perhaps he doesn’t. He has been resting for some time. He likes to pretend his bed is not a tomb. Zayir likes to pretend it is rest and perhaps it is, he thinks, perhaps he is dreaming a long dream that somewhere (somehow) distorted into a nightmare—
Crack.
He opens his eyes.
Or thinks he does.
Everything is dark.
Perhaps he hadn’t opened them, after all.
Zayir remembers a white city; he focuses on that memory, for a moment. What it must have felt like, to feel the sun at his brow and the sweat beading at his flanks. It is a sweet memory where after a moment a group of servants offered rich fruits and chilled wine. What had that tasted like? Vibrant, he thinks, like colours—but what colours had the fruits been? This Zayir cannot remember and then recollects the hard edge of the rock in his flank, the cold, dank chill that creeps up the nape of his neck. What he would not do to feel the arid heat of the desert, again; dry and heavy. The quaking continues; he shifts, but the rock is still in his side. There is a loud crashing noise, louder than he has heard in quite some time—but the memories, they are like that, so realistic, so tangible. He thinks of the War and does not move.
It just—it just opened, sir!
This happens often, to Zayir. Strange memories or moments resurface, unexpectedly. He tries to place this one, but cannot. It becomes more incessant.
My brother is down there!—it swallowed him!
Perhaps it was one of the wars. There were many pits and traps, especially abroad—Zayir shifts.
The rock is still in his side.
For some reason, he is no longer cold. Zayir cannot think of the last time he was not cold.
There are other voices—memories—but he cannot make them out clearly. This frustrates him and he stumbles from where he rests. He is quite certain, now, his body is moving. He feels hungry. Eternally parched. This is nothing new.
Yet he trips in the darkness over something he cannot remember having been there. He would assume it was a sleeping Arete if not for the hard bite of stone against his shins and the sudden, sharp tang of his own blood in the air. That is the moment when Zayir realises something is different, and something is wrong.
He blinks into the darkness. He looks up and is shocked—nearly to the point of breathlessness—that he can see. It is not the ethereal bioluminescence that, at times, pulsates through the various tunnels and catacombs. Nor is it the light of old lanterns or candles, bearing with it the scent of old oil. This is pure light, silvery and distant, as if from the sky.
Zayir stretches out his wings. This is not a part of the day, predictable and eternal and everlasting. He has lived his Day many times, more times than he can now count; an endless Day, where everything occurs as if it were meant to, predestined, where he awakes in the same spot and sleeps in the same spot and listens to the same strange sounds. Their strangeness is no longer strange, to him. This is strange, and it is stranger still that when he flexes his wings they extend at each shoulder. His eyes adjust uncertainly to the light.
He walks unsteadily toward the opening and the tumbled rubble beneath it; a half-wall of a building, a set of dilapidated stairs. There is a crack fissuring above him, he sees now. Zayir moves further toward the light, further toward the voices.
His wings twitch at his shoulders—he can smell dust, and sweat, and fire. The wings spread wider, and wider, until he steels what courage he has left and makes a short run toward the splintered light above. His wings beat the stagnant air and abruptly, clumsily, he takes flight. (This, too, does not feel quite real; this, too, seems like one long memory lived out forever, and ever, and ever). He is confined in the debris of the catacombs; the walls nearly brush either wingtip and when he nears the opening with rubble all about it, he can barely muster the strength to shoot directly upward, through the opening. Once he does, he immediately crashes to the nearby ground.
Zayir looks about him at the gathered—what?—he does not recognise any of them.
I am dreaming, I am dreaming, I am dreaming.
But the blood at his shins and the pain of it is very, very real. He is utterly disoriented, shifting so as to not expose his flanks, and in doing so nearly falls back into the newly opened pit. His wings tuck awkwardly, uncertainly, at his sides. He looks for something to identify with, something familiar—
but there is nothing, nothing, nothing.
They stare at him wide-eyed and with fear.
This is not a memory he has revisited. This is not a memory he has lived a hundred, thousand times.
This is new, and different, and frightening.
At last his eyes settle on the stallion that appears to have some semblance of calmness. He is armed with a spear and a cobra curls at his neck. Zayir nearly snarls. With flared nostrils and panic-stricken eyes he asks, “What is this? Where am I?”
"Speech." || @Jahin
the deeper unsatisfied war
beneath the declared war
