can hold any of the cold torrent under the world
implacable Styx, All else, graces or muons, it crumbles
How, in all her magic, can she not realise. He is already home. He is already dead. There is more than one way to rot; there is more than one way to succumb, gradually or abruptly, to decay. It is in my soul. His eyes are bright like ichor; the blood at his breast looks as if it belongs there, as if his entire life has culminated for this pairing of colours: red on white, white on gold. Zayir measures her with his eyes and knows, in a way arcane and eternal, the echo of magic, magic, magic. There is something familiar in the way her companion conjures dust into bloodthirsty beings; there is something familiar in the way they lap at his blood but continue to starve.
Come away she says.
His laughter emerges so abruptly it surprises even himself. That sound echoes, too, to follow her voice into the dark caverns of death and decay. Zayir cannot help it; he laughs, and laughs, and the laughter itself is as coarse and brittle as the bones around them.
“To where?” Zayir asks. She is too close to him; but her presence is like brushing up against an old, half-forgotten friend. All this time, and nothing has changed. His eyes continue to gleam; they belong more to a great and terrible cat; a Sun Lion, a teryr, a god.
But Zayir is only a man. His mortality is freshly remembered in the sting of his wound.
And then, he reaches for something deep within himself; a fumbling mental grasp, for more. Zayir’s lack of magic is like a phantom limb; he feels it, he remembers it, but when he steps forward it is gone.
Abruptly, he thinks, I do not need magic. Zayir lashes out at the dust creatures; one, two, three powerful stomps of his hooves against the ground. The sound echoes. Resounds. The violence is it’s own type of poetry.
Her companion is something Zayir has seen in a dream, in a nightmare, in these endless catacombs. A demon. A thought. A memory. All and none of those things.
“To where, unicorn?” But Zayir already knows. She carries death around her shoulders as if she is the plain after the battle, bogged with blood and misery. Zayir has already been there.
He had left, unimpressed.
"Speaks" || @Thana
the god of catastrophes took note
