You wrap your name tight around my ribs
And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
(You’ve dreamed this dream before.And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
You are always going backwards.
You are always stepping into a series of grave hallways that do not proceed, but revert, circulate; loop back on to each other, rucked and disobedient to any waking laws of physics or space.
You march. You patrol your ossuary, looking for the cracks in the illusion.
But it isn’t an illusion.
You are living it again. You are entombed until something—the screech of a hawk at hunt, a peel of laughter from the tavern below, a knock at the door from the keep, looking for the week’s deposit—wakes you, undoes the stitches of that arcane, devilish rune.
Except, you are always alone—)
She eyes him with keen, hard suspicion.
Nobody has ever joined her here. She has called and called out, until her throat is raw and the taste of blood on her lips tells her she can call out no more. She has looked, searching for a single soul with breath and life and biology, just enough to let her know this place—this dream, this mimic-hell—lives. A moth, drawn to the oily braziers. A bat, hanging upon a curved and cracked piece of moulding. But silence always answers, with dry throat and swollen language, thick and incoherent.
This place is sterile, salted earth. An untended garden, gone to seed.
So when he comes, limned in light, an answer to a timeless, desperate question, she wonders if he might not be another of Zakariah’s eidolons; a thing made of brutal betrayal and time-bending allurement. Her lips twitch and pull back from her teeth in a scowl, tail flicking in tense irritation against the cold, tight curves of her haunches, waiting for him—it—to answer for himself.
‘You left the door open.’
A low, warning grumbling spills from her bronze lips, eye narrowing. “Had someone only told me there was a door,” she breaths, sardonic and tired as she watches him take in the catacombs as they had been for her. As they had been for her, for a decade, punishment for flying too close to the sun. For reflecting fierce pride into the eyes of jealous contempt.
At least, that’s how she sees it.
Zolin and his cadre surely saw it otherwise.
Bastards all.
Cyrra snorts, a short, sharp exhale of breath, mordant and vaguely amused. The Viper Slayer takes a step forward, peering to her right down a hallway lined with bones and urns, the corner lit dimly with lamplight, but utter darkness prevails down the length until, perhaps twenty paces in, where another lit fire licks at the uninviting black, throwing spectral shadow puppets across the floor.
“Most kind,” she considers the fork at which they stand, before turning her eyes back to him, to the strange, outside light that wreaths his form, her ears catching the question with distinct distraction. “I made a king pout,” she mutters—unable and frankly unwilling to hide the disdain spat into the last word—she shifts her weight, running her tongue across her dry lips.
Then, that light, that balefire, fades around him and her face falls, ears drooping to the side, corners of her lips coming to a frown. “Alqarf,” she sighs and picks up the resigned mien of her body, putting it back together in straight, uniform, militant posture. She looks him in the eyes, disappointment and annoyance colouring each word, “I thought you… knew the way out. Or… were the way out, or... something.”
Cyrra shakes her head, and brushes past him, eyeing the corner, but continuing the way she had been going. That is, no way at all, really. “Keep up, I promise, there is nothing beyond me here.”
She, uh, warms up, I swear - @Dune
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