Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The unknowing crushes him in the form of his own weakness. The names Ipomoea and Eik are both foreign on his tongue, unfamiliar in their strangeness. Zayir feels if he were to try pronouncing them it would come out twisted, wrong. He looks again at Eik’s scars; and then at Ipomoea’s beautiful, winged feet. That is something he has never seen before and finds as fanciful as a strange dream.
They say, stay and Zayir is disappointed. He had wanted to leave and, as he steps closer to them and to the sea, his legs nearly give way from fatigue. He does not feel like himself in that… these stallions should at least carry some semblance of familiarity, of home, but Zayir cannot even tell their Courts from their scents. He remembers so little of what it is to live.
He is surprised when Eik asks of the desert. In doing so, the other stallion tells Zayir one thing: he has either a fondness or a curiosity of it. This strikes him in a way that is strangely sentimental because the desert is the only place Zayir has ever loved but—
there is so little he can say of it, now.
“The desert,” Zayir repeats, almost slowly. His eyes dart between the two stallions. He answer comes stiffly, as if an admission of a lie. “The desert is, as always, rub’ al khali. The empty quarter. The place where men go to discover themselves or perish. It does not change, only the people who come and go within it.” Zayir is aware in his speaking how formal it sounds, a slanting accent that hardly exists within Solterra anymore. Old Solterran. Royal Solterran. The words of Lady Marcisa Arisetta, formed—so many years later—on his tongue.
Then, perhaps a little humorously, he goes, “In other words, the desert is still terribly dry.”
Then Zayir shrugs his shoulders; he steps closer, more comfortable for having spoken. “Where are both of you from? Foreigners, or natives?” he asks. “Are you both soldiers?” He says it because of Eik’s scars and Ipomoea’s heavy eyes. They are eyes that have seen torment, Zayir things, and is unsettled by.
"Speech." || @Ipomoea @
the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity
