You wrap your name tight around my ribs
And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
(I looked for you in the dark—And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
I thought I had heard your laughter once, echoing off the vault of this arcane charnel house. Your voice was a balefire in the funereal black; a lit pyre on the cliffs of some bygone continent that we had once shared in. Delighted in. Made ours through the steady ministrations of our mischief and play and petty arguments. I tried to find you, I tried to follow that sound; held hope, like cradling the last flame of the last fire against my chest.
I called your name.
I called your name until my throat was raw and I could taste blood in my mouth and every fine, level line of me was worn!
And at one point, I was mad that you couldn’t hear me. I howled and wailed and threaded curses like a weaver fashioning fine silk. You know me. But then, I knew. I knew that I screamed your name into the void and that it was all for nought.
Because, Zayir, Gods, he made this hell a severance.
Each our own personal grave.
Then I called your name into the dark just to hear it—)
The darkness consumes everything.
Her, for a moment, as she contemplates the hot stick of blood on her chest, not for the first time, but as if it were. Absently, she thinks about the punishments for taking the life of a brother. Like running her fingers down the pulpy parchment of their oaths and their codes, tracing the grave consequences of her actions in tight, ornamental script. The ordained law of them all, proffered by the hands of Solis himself, to make sure they never broke rank.
Quiaal.
Murderer.
The rusted blade glints like an answer at her feet—
‘Cyrra.’
She had never heard her own name in the dark, save for all the times she had whispered it into the stagnant air; rounding out each syllable, touching her tongue to her teeth with each consonant. Somewhere along the way, she had forgotten it. Had shed it, too, with all the other things that had made her Cyrra. Her brow knits together, wearied gaze shifting to the torch fire and the pale form behind it, emblazoned against the black. Etched in dancing, splaying light is all the known and long-forgotten architecture and geometry that she had mapped so many years ago.
She swallows hard.
(How can a throat be this dry?)
“I...” Cyrra blinks, holds herself together because when everything else has been shook loose and buried, it’s all she will ever have left. The regimented, militant command of her wasted, aching, tormented body. “Gods, Z-Zayir… he—” she shakes her head slowly, pinches her cracked lip between her teeth and takes a shuddering breath. She had felt as Halim had—understands, all too heavily in her bones, that it could have been her. Was her. Knows the impossibly wide, mad gaze like a kin; the demented comportment of one who has taken on the damnable silence and made it their paradise of old stone and rotten offerings.
Accepted the ivory twists of bones and the eyeless sockets as their new Gods.
Traces endless, cyclical prayers to them in dust and in coils of sacrificial memory.
She doesn’t ask how long it has been, because for her, it has been forever and that means too much to bear. That Big-Spear and Umma, Zorif and everyone she had played with and terrorized in the citadel and streets… “Solis help us… Zayir… they’re all dead, aren’t they?” She steps around the still mass of Halim on unsteady feet. “Sahiiq, how did you… you are... I looked for you. For so long.” she reaches out into the dark between them, the coldness that becomes invaded space by their body heat. “How long have you been awake? Who else have you found?”
How long has she been awake? How long had she paced the endless dark of the catacombs until she realized that they were a labyrinth of her own keeping? A contained thing, as Zakariah’s treacherous magic settled as dust in the cracks, those old and those newly opened by the earthquake.
Anger seethes, spits like a viper in his chest and her lip twitches. Her breath comes in hard, steady heaves that wrack her pale form, “Curse...” she echoes, and perhaps for the first time, the magnitude of treachery wrought by the Turncoats blooms in full vivid disgust like a garden in her soul. “Tell me they aren’t still out there, Zayir.” Her hard, hoarse voice is a demand, the sound of a whetstone slipping over iron.
Hover for translation
@Zayir
@Zayir
MINOR POWERPLAYING IS PERMITTED
