He might have hoped decades of sleep would assuage the rage that burned in his veins.
It did no such thing.
Cairo awakens in the deep bowels of Solterra, as the earthquake rattles the skeletal foundations of the catacomb. His eyes spring open at the earth’s call. Sand and debris lie, covering his body in a film of dust and grime.
The warrior returns from his induced sleep, cast back into his body. It is still frozen as it had been ten years ago. The vestiges of twisted magic that cast him into slumber still reside in the edges of his torso. His maw is still open with its silent scream of fury, though his eyes are no longer closed against the light of magic. Cairo was caught and incapacitated as he lunged for the unstoppable magic. Like the sea, the wave of magic was unstoppable.
As he rouses, a stone statue finding life, Cairo vows he would never be outmatched again.
His body soon reclaims itself and falls out of its twisted, thrashing pose. His wings fall from where they had been clawing at the walls in ire. The warrior lands upon his knees, his control over his limbs, his body, is as pitiful as a newborn fawn.
But Cairo kneels to no one, even in the solitary confinement of a tomb.
As a teryr he rises, vengeful.
A cloud of dust billows from his feathers with the action. The tomb exults his living, echoing the sounds of his breath over and over.
How long does Cairo stand there, gasping and relearning his body and what it is to live within it again? Slowly his nerves remember, slowly his lungs breathe in the fetid, dead air around him more easily.
He regains himself in time to hear the voices who approach.
Slowly he pushes himself forward. His spine aches, his wings twinge from holding himself up. A pair of voices grow closer and Cairo slowly turns his gaze toward the shattered tomb’s entrance. The wall is broken open and in the entryway, black as pitch, though a golden light breaks through.
The regal feathers atop his poll crown his stare with the wickedness of blades. The voices no longer approach. He looks to the bodies of his fellow warriors, none are rousing like he. And for a moment he slips and thinks, what of… What of..? The name dares not come to his mind,
Cairo casts it from him. It falls from his consciousness, tattered by talons, burnt by his fury.
The voices do not come to him. So he twists for the entrance of his tomb. His tail twitches through the settled dust of the carved floor. He slinks, leonine, tail lifting as he silently prowls from his tomb.
Avian, his skull twists, his ears moving to catch the voices, soft, muffled. He moves toward them, regal, lethal. Furry simmers through every inch of him. He bears no weapon, he needs none.
Rocks lie in his path, fallen from where the wall has broken between him and the tomb the voices speak within. He climbs them, wings aiding him. Dust cascades in clouds from his gilded body as Cairo looms out of the darkness.
In silence, beneath the thick kohl of his lashes, he grasps the gazes of a golden man and a silver girl. It is a look as sharp as gilded talons. And with it Cairo clutches them tighter, tighter prying from them every breath of truth and explanation they keep upon their tongues. Then it slips away, like a snarl, to the lion that cautiously examines the crystal catacomb of his brethren.
Aqualine and slow he descends the rubble, into the dark tomb. His feathers rustle, his teeth clack like a beak and his lips curl into a soft, ominous grin. His body moves as a mirror of the lion’s, he slinks through the tomb, weighing up the inquisitive trio.
Cairo knows what it is to be lapsed, the final grains of ancient sand fall from the muscled curves of his body. His hourglass has finished its countdown, this Arete has awoken. Demands for an explanation are aquiline cries upon his tongue.
The girl’s final question still echoes, the ghosts of her voice singing off the crystal sarcophagus.
“The catacombs.” Cairo answers her with a voice that has not rusted. It is silken destruction, slipping through the darkness of the tomb. It caresses, it curls, it weaves, pressing upon soft skin, clawing at the walls. He watches the way she bites her winter lip, innocent, gentle. “Where are the rest of the soldiers?” Cairo purrs as his neck arches, regal, divine. That soft question, those simmering words, bely the talons of his aquiline gaze. It conceals within him the frantic ire that cries, savagely. Talons are not just clawing in his gaze, they are at his throat, his lungs, his heart. Cairo rips himself apart from within.
”Where are the rest?” He croons, he snarls, he demands. He will draw the answer from their tongues, their lips, whatever way he must.
@Orestes @
