She glows. Her heavy strands of black hair slide /
☼
like serpents over somber, blood-red plush.
The canyon was a Solis-made gift to his people, a chasm ingrained upon the earth, carved from the red stone and the sand, cracking into the bloodless veins deep within the chassis of the desert. The only moisture within its endless, branching basins were the drying decay of lost wanderers, who dared to delve too deep. The fissures within the walls of each tunnel spun tales: machinations of erosion and the rare interference of the elements—or places where the lost, the hungry, had tried to claw free?
Elatus was a gift to Solterra. But so, too, was it a wordless threat, and an undertaking of misery, to the outsiders that dared to trek it.
Hälla was within and without of either identity, and the mindless litany of her woeful daydreams had guided her toward the great fissures, heedless of what danger would find her there.
Her heart beat to the drums of separate songs. A stuttering staccato, rhythmless, careening through the works of what symphonies it recalled.
The first told her of hot stone beneath her soles, where her body would lay upon sediment each night, waking to the needle-sharp bed of desert. Where her scarred limbs would unwind themselves from the dust and the grit, her dapples inlaid with gemstone adornments of rock; of heat. Where the dark and light of her hair spilled, unbound, into the tawny ashes of crushed stone and burnt, crippled earth.
In that life, she had mapped the body of the desert as intimately as her own, until they breathed in endless tandem—until the blood that fed her brimstone heart sang of sand, and sunshine, and flame.
The second song spoke of another maze. A forest. One that turned on and on upon itself, into a directionless twist of landmarks and faces; where no matter how far she ran, the same surroundings unfurled. Curtains drawn back to reveal an inescapable nightmare, where each turn lead her to the same, inexplicable destination.
Gurgling water, the groan of a bullfrog. The sightless eyes of twin monuments, erected in the honor of cruel and faceless gods. A sloping prairie of birch, where the wind kissed her skin; where her body hit the ground again, again, again. Where her mouth tasted of blood, and her lovelorn heart sampled flavors of brokenness; where she feared, and trembled, and hated—
Neither life spoke to her in tongues she wished to heed. And so, she swallowed them, as the desert would its prey, and she marched onward, toward the cusp of the world.
Or at least, to the deep scars that dug in to the belly of the barren dunes, heedless of the would be life that might have, could have, fought to fruition. The canyons were wasted; as she was wasted. The chasms were broken; as she, perhaps, was.
She would not think of that either. The catacombs had not broken her—she would not allow memory to, either.
But the dappled woman, in all her dun-hued garb of grit and sediment, did not dare step into one of the sloping tunnels that descended from the lip of the chasm. The winding tunnels whispered promises into the flutes of her pinned, aching ears, but there was not a wish in the world that they could grant her.
Her heart possessed a key. And if she dared to step towards her stairway to remembrance, she knew she would find her unlocking.
And so, she would not.
How long she stood there (the desert soaking her in golden light, threatening to set the embers of her destructive appetites aflame), she could not say. Her eyes were sightless as she peered over the lip of the canyon, her belly empty, her mind silent.
Only the wind spoke to her. The wind, and the resonating cacophony of hooves. One after another; a step for a step. Two, three, four— a clatter of light-footed determination, as somewhere, within the tunnels, a soul climbed free of hell.
She never called to them. The Hawthorne woman did not utter a sound.
She waited. A pinprick of shadow amid the light. She waited.
The canyon’s victor did not impress her, heaving a tawny haired body from the heart of the canyons. And yet still, she was tempted—to heed the irresistible calling to step closer, to map the dangerous ledge upon which she stood, to tight rope the precarious, crackling stone as she idly made her way nearer. Purpose was written upon her eyes, but what it was she sought, she could not dare to say.
She did not wish to remember, and yet, coming closer—fixing her hoary eyes upon the dun skin of this gold throated stranger—
Hello? her heart breathed.
No, her mind hissed.
There was no preamble to her approach, only the directionless ghosting of a wraith. As she had wanted from Avallac’h, all she could covet from this stranger was a distraction.
“Why,” was all she said, at first. Her words were inflectionless, her throat hoarse. “What in there could tempt you so much?”
Nothing, she already knew. Nothing, save for pride.
