Zayir, who will never admit to having felt fear, fears the night. He fears the judgement of the cool stars and Caligo’s silver eye, too bright, always, whether it is winking or wide. The moon unnerves him and it bleaches from him the golden colour at the tips of his wings; bathed in moonlight, Zayir is silver and cold.
That is how he stands: silver and cold. He is before the entrance of the catacombs with torches burning. It is here he gazes into the black abyss and the black abyss gazes back; it fill him with an unnamable, inescapable dread.
And yet that dread, attached to it, is a hollow kind of longing. It is the same ghostly sense of leaving a battle alive, of emerging intact and somehow whole. Once the tragedy, the violence, has touched you—you can never be untouched. But in that is a sort of elation.
Zayir, having emerged from the catacombs, is a survivor. So why, then, does he stand so diligently each night? Why does he pray before the entrance each day, as Solis arcs across Solterra’s sandstone walls and then dips beyond the end of the world?
Tonight, Zayir stands watch. Tonight, Zayir tries not to fill the pull into the deep, the dark, that tells him, come back, come back an dream.
He bites the inside of his cheek until it bleeds. He stamps his hoof; stretches his wings. And his mind turns on itself with a vibrant, sharp memory. Why are you here? he asks himself, and like a whip the reasoning comes.
”Son, where is Cyrra?”
Zorif—Zayir’s father, although he rarely thinks him of that, as anything besides sir, qayid alharb, Captain—asks the questions. Demands, in fact, the question. Zayir doesn’t know—they had been out in Elatus, practicing desert navigation. Zayir had thought it was a competition—he had thought they were meant to compete, to race, to see who was better.
“Zayir,” this time qayid alharb says it sharply. “Where is Cyrra?”
“I—I… I don’t know. I thought it was a contest, qayid. I thought—“
“You thought? No, Zayir. Warriors—no, no, mere plebes… You don’t think, you follow. You listen, to what you are told.” Zorif did not often raise his voice, but he did now. The other stallions dark eyes, usually so stoic, so somber, came alight with an inner fire Zayir had never seen. “And the most important thing, in any exercise no matter how competitive… the most important thing is personnel accountability. No go out and find her. She is qiteat alruwh, a piece of soul. A comrade, forever—you do not lose her, you don’t compete to the point of putting yourselves in danger. To you, she is rafiq, she is companion. Now go. Don’t come back—never come back—until you find her.”
———
The earthquake had awoken him, and several other Arete. But not enough. Nowhere near enough. He haunts the entrance of the catacombs waiting; hoping; praying. The names of the missing are engraved in his mind as if he, himself, is their headstone. As if he, himself, is their monument. They seem to emerge more and more slowly or are found dead.
Halim.
Abdul.
Farrah.
Dina.
Rajiya.
Sekhmet.
Nefertiti.
Cyrra.
Cyrra.
Cyrra?
It has become a nightly ritual as Zakariah’s curse is broken. Zayir hears the voice. He descends into the catacombs to answer the maddened call; already he has held the bleeding, decayed bodies of too many of his friends. Already their time in the catacombs has sent so many to madness and those who have emerged have done so touched, forever changed. He would be a liar if he were not relieved Cairo had already appeared; the man who—
And Zayir stops himself.
There is one more whom his heart bleeds for. One more whom he must… he must know their fate. And it is with creeping apprehension that his journeys deeper, and deeper into the catacombs. From this distances the screams are disjointed; he cannot understand the maddened speech. When it stops, suddenly, Zayir is alarmed. He brandishes the torch forward, lighting the way, and begins to trot.
What alarms him more is the telltale echo of a blade in the dark.
No, no, no. Had it been another suicide? Another manic, broken mind unable to come to terms with their reality? Lost to the eternity Zakariah had created? Arjun had led them into?
“No, no, no.” It is a broken, strangled whisper at his lips. When he comes around a final bend and illuminates the darkness with the torch, Zayir is so shocked he drops it.
The flame burns at his feet. Shadows dance across his chest and face and then the haunted express of the mare across from him.
Qiteat alruwh.
Rafiq.
“Cyrra.”
At her feet Halim lays dead, the dagger between them. It lay still trembling from the fall, and where it’s blade quivers it points towards Zayir. He watches the blood pool and thinks,
Halim had always been of strong mind—how… how is it him? How is he dead?
But the shock of Halim’s death is nothing compared to the sudden, welling hope in his chest. He says it tentatively, uncertain. The blade is bright in the torchlight. His eyes are drawn to it with fearful apprehension. Solis, no. From the distance, he could not tell if it were Cyrra’s manic voice or Halim’s.
“Cyrra.” He repeats her name, speaking slowly. “It’s—it’s over. The curse, it’s been broken.”
It’s ten years later.
Nothing is the same.
"Speaks" || @
glory, glory, what a helluva way to die
glory, glory what a helluva way to die
