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 once hurled sand in Zayir’s eyes here. And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
They had been playing as children, rough-housing, testing their edges against the mettle of one another. That she had not meant to do. The bruises and scrapes, the kicks and bites and bloody noses. Those were gifts. Those were part and parcel of their cutthroat relationship growing up. They were laughed off, or they were argued over. Or they were left as great, looming, seething silences that went on for days and days, darkening the gardens and halls and streets between them until it was deemed enough.
The sand thing had been an accident.
Her bitter, venomous temper had manifested itself in the swill of sand that gathered in the air around her legs, bent to the heaving pulse of her volatility and emotions.
That’s gone now. Stripped from her, stitch by stitch, until she had been reborn a different woman entirely. A breathing, blooded body, moored of mind to a dead underworld, carried like a bony passenger back into the land of the living. It had taken and taken, and now the Traitors had more to answer for than just the untold years of her life and the way they had cast ghosts into her body like she had been nothing.
Like she hadn’t held a shield and spear to their backs.
Like she hadn’t called them brother.
The dunes lay, inanimate formations of senseless particles, beneath her, cleaved from the arcane seam they had once shared. She commands them no more.
The Viper Slayer weaves through the clutches of palm and cirus trees, verdant agave and pale, mauve sage, that wreathes the bright blue pool of Vitae.The giving-waters of Solis, the altar upon which life descends to genuflect with dripping mouths. She does so now, dropping her head down to drink and to ponder the strangeness of her being here at all. The sun glints hard and hot off the burnished copper of her serpentine neckpiece; crawls the tight, militant geometry of her body. Her wings are tucked tight against her body, her stony, blue eyes are somehow both distant and alert, both here and there.
Alive and unalive.
But it is the slip of sand, the purchase of hoof on stone, the brush of skin and feather against rough bark and thick, rubbery leaves, that draws her from her worship. Her ears tip, nostrils flaring, water drops down her throat as she raises her head to observe—You. “Cairo.” Her voice is flat and severe, but the small smile that tips one side of her umber lips is vaguely amused.
MINOR POWERPLAYING IS PERMITTED
