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 thought she had reached the nadir of her torment.And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
She thought she had breathed herself full of charnel air. So full, that the first clear inhale she had taken when she finally surfaced alongside Zayir had almost choked her, rejected as a saltwater fish does fresh. Had heard her fill of the faint tattoo of bony digits on old, cracked stone, like so many warpaths from the nether. Had breathed enough errant, wild whispers, like ghosts making home in jewelled, golden sarcophagi, that her voice had become the sole company she kept until it too died. Had paced herself so weary, that she had found respite and rest against the twists of pale bone and the thick wraps of linen that held preserved forms in chilling abeyance. Had wandered down labyrinthine halls of skulls and ribs and vertebrae, did so for so long, that it seemed to her the whole world must be made of skeletons.
Even now, as she finds purchase on old, familiar ground, she mistakes loose rocks under her feet for the dusty, nauseating crunch of brittle bone and cringes.
(How could ten years feel like a lifetime?
Ten whole years.)
How could it still cling to her, that old stale air, the osseous redolence, the mummified darkness that held no end but instead an endless looping perdition? One step, she is bathed in radiant Solis’ heat, touching each militant, tight swarth of her misused body, coaxing life where there had been such settled lifelessness. And in the very next, she passes back into the far-beneath, cast like a damnable thing into an abyss of mortal, treacherous creation.
She thought she had reached the nadir, but as it turns out, the untangling is the worst part. The moment when she passes through the market and the smell of horsehair, cardamon, chilli and saffron suddenly cede to the stench of grime and subterranean torpor. She jerks her head around to find she is surrounded on all sides by customers, holding bundles of cinnamon sticks to be inspected and merchants, hawk curios from far-lands; by ruddy, sandstone walls and the harsh, white-hot sunlight that fills each crack and crevice contained. But, in the shadows that same sun casts, between walls and under awnings, shape the eyeless sockets and cryptic eternity of her hell.
She works, in restive, frantic ministrations to untie herself. To shake it loose like hair in the morning, and be free, yet.
Cyrra loses herself, now, in the lurching, red-stone of the canyon. She follows the winding, squeezing and opening paths, and they reek of her walking nightmare in the way they seem like a maze made to keep her alone forever. Except she knows, in her heart, that it’s not a maze but a challenge, and she knows the way to the top like the lines of her own bruised and aching knees. She has tread this quandary before. She has faced the dead ends and the dizzying confusion when you think you’ve lost your way. Because the sedimentary stone walls that rise on either side are so tall that you can no longer see the position of the sun, only a thin line of blue, cloudless sky.
The Viper Slayer learned the way to the top by leaving white, chalked marks on the intersections and by racing Zayir, until the openings that lead upwards rather than ever onwards revealed themselves to her.
It is just past high noon when she heaves her body up, sweat slicks and froths along her pale groin and neck, her chest expands in rapid, gulping breaths. She could have flown. Of course she could have, but that had always been cheating. The easy way up. This had been a pilgrimage, and she stands now, a qajiid, forged in sun and labour. She sighs and stretches out her ecru wings, light limning the preened feathers, glinting off her damp form. Scorched earth splays out before her in its beauty of rolling dunes and hard, green succulents; the walled city of the Day Court; below it, the unsealed catacombs, being inspected by scholars as if it hadn’t been their misery for a decade prior.
And beyond that, somewhere, the Traitors bask in good Solis’ rays, like snakes.
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@Hälla
@Hälla
MINOR POWERPLAYING IS PERMITTED
