You wrap your name tight around my ribs
And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
Cyrra gulps down the last of the mulled wine and lets the bronze cup clatter to the ground.And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
The world swims.
The world is warm and heady.
No.
It’s cold.
She curls into herself, folding over the newly cleaned straw of her bed in the inn she had taken up long-term residence in since awakening from the catacombs and being rescued from the stygian depths by Zayir. Downstairs, lute music trills under the overtones of The Duneworm Inn’s rambunctious patrons. Laughter and yelling; a festal, lively, seething sound that has been her lullaby for the past few weeks or so.
It soothes her.
It reminds her she is not alone.
Except, up here, she is.
Up here she is all alone. And cold, though her body, from throat to knee, is held in the quietive hands of alcoholic reverie, rocking like mother’s hips in the womb to some semblance of sleep—the only reliable form of sleep she has found yet. (Umma and Big-Spear would be scandalized.). Her stark, swimming blue eyes flutter shut, lashes touching the high, august line of cheekbone, both nestling against the abrasive rub of straw. Her breath, spiced and slightly sour, becomes even in time. Deep and rhythmic as she marches like an intrepid pilgrim backwards. Or forwards.
Or neither, for the dream-world has not longitude nor latitude, but is a place without limitation.
And yet…
The darkness is lit by the oily flames of soot-black braziers, spaced in long, even intervals. Enough, that the path ahead seems certain, but the margins around and between are full of the looming, growing dread of unknown. Unknown for some. Too familiar to her. She takes a stiff, militant step forward. The clack of her hoof on the old stone echoes. She squints up, but she cannot see the ceiling, for they are vaulted high, and though they are festooned with the images of Gods and souls in search of Gods—once painted but now flaking bare and dulled—nobody could possibly see the storied carvings in the pitch darkness.
The stale smell of that crypt’s foul air fills her nostrils, blots out any residual perfume of fermented fruit and horsehair. “Hell beacons, come,” she mutters, and the way the charnel silence eats her words makes her stomach lurch. The Viper Slayer gives her head a sharp shake and walks, the tips of her crackled hooves dragging along the dusty stone floor—tshhhh-clack, tshhhh-clack—as she begins her tireless shift.
(It feels like forever.
Another ten years went by, before you appear.)
Cyrra is not used to another in this place, and so, at first, she mistakes the form for another spectre haunting. She acknowledges it with narrowed eye and a curt snort, but then the world of her mind’s own making begins to crack and split at the seams around the visitor. She stops, her head held high, chin tucked towards her chest, in proud, guarded distrust. “How did you get here?” she demands, her voice is iron and venom, aching.
Perhaps it is not the visitor who reveals the weaknesses in her mind-prison willingly, but by simply being, extends to Cyrra the possibility that this hell is not as real as it seems.
Perhaps, the visitor does not see it like this, but to Cyrra’s hard gaze, the faintest trace of sunlight halos the lucid stranger.
I hope this works! Feel free to powerplay the setting of course! @Dune
MINOR POWERPLAYING IS PERMITTED
