prate me not about covenants
There can be no covenants between men and lions
There can be no covenants between men and lions
W
hen Zayir first sees Adonai, he can only envision a tawny antelope thinned from the herd. A sick thing, waiting to die. Scavengers pursue it. Vultures, jackals, the harbingers of a death assured. Zayir is too much like these things now; he has come too close to the sword’s honed edges in his life, and so he dreams of those vultures over a battlefield, the stink of the dead multitude. This is only one man he observes, disguising his death with silks and oils, well-groomed and apparent Solterran royalty.
Zayir is there only because he obsessively stakes out observation posts for Arete yet to emerge from the catacombs. He waits, daily, at different entrances and calls down into the dark. Most days, no one answers. But there have been some where another Arete emerges, wide-eyed and half-feral, neither alive nor dead. Lost. Dreaming, but awake.
It bothers him to watch from the nearby shrub-oak as the Solterran royal is delivered, and then left. The way he seems a visiting tourist to the tragedy of other men. Zayir waits until the man is submerged in the darkness of the entrance before pursuing. His fury is thinly masked; Zayir prowls forward, leonine and supple, his feathers bristled at his neck. It is not difficult for Zayir to take the first, sharp right into another corridor off the main entrance; he knows the catacombs well enough to understand this thin path (so thin, in fact, his wings are pressed into his shoulders and he feels the earth on every side) leads to an area further up the main corridor. He intends to cut the “visitor” off.
Zayir succeeds. He is standing at the end of the hallway when Adonai lights his torch. He listens to the awkward fumbling and then, when everything is briefly illuminated. Perhaps the site of him is so shocking the man drops the torch in terror. Perhaps he is only impotent.
There is a cold, languid fury building within him. The sickness in it mimics the sickness in the pegasus before him, still slightly silhouetted by the desert light that streams (faintly, nearly imperceptibly) this far into the catacombs. There is the thought that he could kill this man and no one would think it strange. He was clearly a fool, to enter the catacombs alone, so obviously ill. But what would that make Zayir? The jackal, the vulture?
No, he is and forever will be the lion, the leopard. He is Solis’s child and where he holds fury, and pride, he also holds honour. “You are a long way from your palace, lost prince.” Zayir whispers. His tone is teething and in the darkness he feels like a god. “Tell me, does this jaunt into tragedy entertain you, my liege, my prince of fine silks and comfort? Do you have any idea what is stagnant within these catacombs? What is waiting in these catacombs? And you are a mere visitor, an observer.” Zayir snorts derisively. He steps forward, close enough to Adonai that the Prince will certainly realise Zayir is not a monster, or a god, but simply a man.
That, in many ways, is worse.
“I am Zayir Saqr, Zaeim of the Arete. Are you here to admire our corpses? Or are you here because you wish to be one? Perhaps you are merely a surveyor of Solterran royalty, bila sharaf, searching for more wealth? From the looks of you, you could use it.”
His voice is a hard whip against flesh. It is lash, after lash, after lash. With his telepathy he retrieves the man’s fallen torch and strikes it; sending them into fierce, violent illumination. “Would you like your tour, ’amir murid?”
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