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 swirls the amethyst liquid in her cup, watching the listless glint of firelight break on the heady, fragrant surface, before taking another deep drink. And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
It runs down her throat, warm and, Solis-willing, it kills the unwelcome, mutinous things it comes into contact with along its way to her muddled thoughts. The dread that fills her, dark and forlorn, with endless echoes of entombment. The sadness, heavy and heaving, of a decade lost to singular, chasmal darkness. Of all the things that could have been—the lingering doubts at the end of a blade, the linger doubts between some else’s bedsheets; the great, golden sunrises and copulations and bloodsheds. The anger that lives as a nest of vipers in her breastbone; that has always been there, but now mutates into self-consuming revenge. An animus that serves not to drum the tattoo of war into her veins, exhilarating and red, but the sickening tap-tap-ing of a treachery she cannot let go of.
A treachery she must let go of in order to move on.
But she’s never been good at moving on.
She has always been good at casting wrongs and right in iron, monuments to her steadfast and unwavering arrogance.
Her gaze lingers a moment longer on the city, on the pulsating way is seethes in the night, restive and raw. Gathering itself, putting joy and lust over wounds and old scars like tonics and salves. ‘Miserable is an understatement.’ She hmmms under her breath, a commiserate tone. Her brow raises as she turns her eyes to his, and wonders, briefly, what he drinks to kill, before rasing her goblet to toast the bitter truth, her bronze lips tilting in a mordant smile. “It often is, Noam.”
Cyrra watches him drink again and takes the cue, moving to press her own chest against the chilled sandstone barrier. She swallows and laughs, though it is hard and barbed, dreamy around the mulled edges, “Depends what worth I’m trying to get out of it tonight,” she turns her head. Through the arched doorway, shadows dance and flash in colour and light; shapeless masses that, in time with the music, bear faces like masks of emotions she does not understand. Twisted, foreign, strange lines. “It’s nice to know someone is enjoying themselves out there.” But her tone is acidic and drab, and when she looks back to him, she feels the pretence is only insulting, “or it’s fucking annoying.”
When he asks his next question, her bark of laughter is almost, almost, amused without any of the bite. She looks at him with a cocked brow, expectant, challenging, it says, ‘well, are you?’. Instead, she simply shakes her head, eyes fluttering shut for a moment. “Do I look like a dancer?” Maybe. In a way. She is agile, slender, but with muscle that speaks of dune-treading and pirouettes against the still foe of a training dummy.
She was branded a soldier at birth. Elegant in her propensity for violence; beautiful in the hard, serpentine curves and brutal, utilitarian angles.
Doesn’t mean she has never wished something different for herself. Doesn’t mean she has never danced, given herself over to the beat of a drum and thrum of an oud. But that was a decade ago. A long, subterranean solitude separates her from that person. “No. I’m here to watch, and be miserable. Tell me you at least had better intentions when you started your night?”
@Noam
MINOR POWERPLAYING IS PERMITTED
