You wrap your name tight around my ribs
And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
She wakes up in a cold sweat—And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
She feels pressed down upon on all sides.
She feels enormously small, if such a thing can be felt. Picked apart, skinned, cleaned out and emptied. Remade with sepulchral hands. She is filled with stagnant, old charnel air; the dust of wasting bones; the thin, dried slips of skin that cling to the spires of ribs like flags of surrender. She is filled with grime and cracked pottery; copper and silver tithes for the ferryman, filling her mouth and eyes until, overflowing, they pool at her feet. She is preserved, like some lewd and unlovely statue of herself, unblushing in her nakedness. Indignant in the way it has shed her of her hero’s mien, left her bladeless and bloodless and buried leagues under the sand.
So far from the hallowed rays of the Aliila’alhaa, the Sun-God.
She slips from the soiled straw of her bed and absconds into the night.
This city is a mausoleum to her. A house of dead—a house of the long-lost, the laid to rest and the eternally restless. But for a necropolis, it is surprisingly lively. Perhaps that’s why she takes to the streets, shouldering aside the inebriated with gruff, unfriendly grunts; why she swerves amongst their heated, sweaty, redolent bodies. Even if their garbled, myriad voices are deafening in the stone echo chambers of her mind; and their smell is sweat and horsehair and alcohol on lips, and that’s far more than old dust and older stone. Because for untold years she knew only a crypt of her own keeping. A plain of existence reserved for her and her alone—plucked from the earth, laid below the living.
They had been the apotheosis, the closest to Solis, and for that, they had each paid a heavy toll.
She snatches a bronze goblet off of a tray on her way by. The mulled, spiced, amethyst liquid pitches dangerous and sheds droplets onto the cobbled ground as the Arete weaves through the formless, seething crowd, tucking her broad, pale wings close to her ribs. The tambourine, lyre and panflute play a raucous tune, the bawdy language of the bard that trills alongside is all but lost in the lurching of bodies. The soft purl of skin, the shrill peals of laughter.
She watches with cold distance as she walks the perimeter, feeling no more a part of this living world as she had the dead. An in-between.
The open archway of the door proffers a respite—quite, but not too quiet—and so she passes the sill and onto the outlook, the autumn night air moving into the vacuum left behind by the festal press. It is cool, making note of the martial angles and elegant curves of her body like a welcome, comfortable in its familiarity, even after all this time. She takes a deep breath, her throat pressing against the glinting copper serpent, and brings the edge of the cup to her lips. Vanilla and cinnamon, it beats the hell out of ash and dust. The Viper Slayer moves to unfurl her wings, to stretch them out in the pearly moonlight, but her sharp, blue gaze catches him and her lip twitches. Her body stiffens.
She needs more to drink.
Still, she cannot part now, cannot plunge back into the fray in soon, so she clears her throat and steps to look over the edge, their wings outstretched could measure the gap between them. “You’re a miserable recluse too, are you?” There is no warmth in the surprisingly soft, cold voice, just the faint trace of camaraderie behind the bite of sarcasm. She clears her throat again and, looking off into the darkness, across the twinkling hearthfires and convergent tides of equine bodies, “Cyrra.”
@Noam
MINOR POWERPLAYING IS PERMITTED
