styx this carver of caverns beneath us is. styx this black water, this down pouring. the well is deep. from its stillness the words our voice speak echo. resonance follows resonance. waves of this sound coming up to us.
When Zayir had been entombed, he had met Death in the eye of Time, gleaming like a salt-tear. He had met Death in the absolute darkness of his sleepless sleep, where the gravity held in the way of dead stars. The darkness of that Death is in him now, in that endless trip of memories and semi-consciousness, of wandering neither awake nor asleep.
The same feeling follows him in the throb of his own heart, a constant reminder of mortality. At night he dreams of the Reaper sleeping at his feet like a dog, scythe clenched in his jaws, or of Acheron with a purse full of dead men’s coins. Even in death we must pay. He thinks of the river Neilos and arriving there with no copper coins, for Acheron to say, you cannot afford to die.
But such things are stories his father told him. And they are stories that have repeated in his own mind for a decade, until they feel more real than the citizens now within Solterra’s walls. Zayir does not sleep but walks through the tired city, bleached white-and-silver by the moonlight.
He goes back to his tomb. He descends into the catacombs with the care of a man going to rest; step-by-step, nearly shuffling. Zayir tucks his wings and enters with a strange, familiar calm. These crypts are more familiar to him now than the city he once bled for. These crypts are more humane, he thinks, than what exists outside of them.
He should take a torch with him, but does not. Instead Zayir descends into the darkness-that-is-death. He hears the catacombs, then—it is the sound of his slumber, the sound of his endlessly, self-consuming dreams that tumbled end-over-end in his mind until he could no longer tell the truth from the lie, the reality from the fantasy, the memory from the truth. A humming like a heartbeat about to end. A humming like a bird’s fragile wings. A humming like a boat against the current.
Zayir follows, trance-like, into the deeper dark. He follows until the distant moonlight is only a memory and everything seems absolute, until his eyes adjust to the faint bioluminescence that exists strangely within the catacombs as if magic, as if rotting with it.
He answers the song by pulling the forgotten blade of one of the dead Arete from the old warrior’s crypt, and slicing a line of flesh across his heart. He answers the song when his blood drip, drip, drips onto the stone floor. Then Zayir drops the blade and it clatters in the dark, ringing, ringing, ringing into the hum like a last breath.
"Speaks" || @Thana
three thousand years we have recited its virtue out of hesiod. it is twenty-five thousand since the ice withdrw from the lands and we came forth from the realm of caverns where the river beneath the earth we knew we go back to. styx pouring down in the spring from its glacial remove, from black ice. fifty million years, from the beginning of what we are, we knew the depth of this well to be. fifty million years deep (but our knowing deepens, time deepends) this still water we thirst for in dreams we dread
