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 is an aibnatu alraml—daughter of the dunes—made when the rough skin of a meridional foreigner found the sun-forged hips of a tribal beauty. Raised in the irrigated gardens of a long-dead Queen, inside the white-hot walls of the Day Court; under the watchful eye of the sun high above in a realm of forever blue. And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
Perhaps that is why she feels strange here—why she had always felt strange leaving the scorched earth of Solterra for the more arable lands that lay beyond. It wasn’t just the shift from giving sand to firm, supportive soil and stone, or the way the air cooled off and grew more or less humid with each passing phase of land.
It was in her blood, which seemed to scream out like a string being pulled too taut, for the rust-red stone and clutches of hardy succulents that staked claims like so many sun-drenched pioneers.
For the land that brought her ever closer to mighty Solis.
She can’t deny the excitement.
The trips far afield had always held the promise of adventure, even when they held the assurance of war. And it had indeed been war that had last coaxed her out of the desert and on a warpath to a destruction that ran as red and quick as blood. And, though that was a very, very long time ago, she avoids Denocte, pursuant instead of a path to Terrastella, where the gates of that Dawn kingdom had been thrown open in welcoming for Fall festivities.
She aches to get away, just as much as she does to turn around and go back.
By night, cool and full of rowdy spirit, she relishes the way the distance from that arcane hell—those catacombs that had long kept her as a ghost in the shell of hell—makes her feel. The way the shadows at the corner of her eyes no longer seem so intent on calling her back to the nether. The way she can no longer hear the faint click-click like bones rapping on the insides of stone sarcophagi.
She feels lighter, plied further by a heady red wine, fire-warmed and mulled with cinnamon and nutmeg.
Weaving through the crowd, seething like a sea of limbs and lips, Cyrra slips out to the margins where she moves with a sway that is somewhere between martial and sensual—a strange, disarming admixture. She takes another sip. It runs down her throat and settles with a rippling warmth in her gut and loosens, with every step, the muscles of her body, coiled and hard as snakes.
She searches for nothing.
Needs nothing.
Or everything.
She places the empty earthenware cup on a platter, folding her wings tight against her slender ribs; stark, hard blue eyes just slightly watery, just slightly softer. She meanders until she catches the sound of a voice. Stilling, the dark-brown edge of her lips stained a darker red, set in a straight, though not unpleasant, line; her gaze fixing in the throb of the crowd on the striking, dark winged-woman. A soldier’s mien tilts, and becomes something between standoffish and come-hither, as The Viper Slayer’s brow furrows, her head extending ever so slightly towards the stranger to hear her better.
‘What brings you to our autumn harvest?’
“Oh,” she pulls herself back, the coil of serpentine bronze around her neck settling into position. “Change of scenery.” Her voice is sharp, but tonight, it has an almost agreeable undertone. Though her body does not open up like the swirling dancers and merrymakers around them.
Not entirely.
She’s far too careful for that.
The Viper Slayer shifts her weight and clears her throat, “Cyrra. Day Court,” more or less. Though, less than more at the moment, for she had only just surfaced from a decade of stagnant hell underground, and had only the faintest grasp of the Novus she had emerged into.
@Mephisto
MINOR POWERPLAYING IS PERMITTED
