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 lifts her brows sardonically (or, is it wistfully—mercifully, he’ll never know for the way shadow mars the language of her facial features to gibberish) at the word Kings—And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
In many ways, she was moulded to be a kings-woman from birth.
A guard and a tool—a weapon, extended; thrust and cutting. And so she did. And so she did time and time again. Whether it was her trusty scimitar shedding the stuffing a of training dummies in the Colosseum or piercing between the ribs of an enemy of Soleterra or Leisha. She thrust. And she cut. She loosed souls to the afterlife with light, elegant archs of sun-glistening bronze. And she did it under the banner of a King (and a Queen; especially a Queen) and that was meant, perhaps, to go on for eternity. To go on as long as the kingsline bled into its bloated and gilt river of eminence.
Until there came a king unworthy of it.
Until there came a king, too jealous of their—
They had flown too close to the sun, you see. Touched a god and were found unworthy of it. Were found too lowly to bask in that comfort and divinity; too mortal and far too delicate for that kind of heat. Were held like paragons against the sandy breast of a sun-realm—or so they were told—but were flesh and blood and bone. And mind, too prone to trust and too wanting of their own reprisals. It meant something different to each of them, but each of them thought they had found what they needed to hear on the Traitor’s tongue and look where it had got them.
Look where it had got them.
’Was it worth it?’ She chews her lip, eyes searching methodically in the darkness for that which she knows is not there—a way out; her brothers and sisters in arms; Zayir; Big-Spear and Umma; release; death, life—a strange pantomime, for even she knows that this is a dream. A fleeting thing, a twisted and perverse flight of fancy. She has to wonder what her subconscious is hoping to get out of this charade. Was it closure? Was it understanding? She understood it perfectly well. “Worth it? Hmph. I regret almost everything about what landed me in this hell,” she mutters, low and bitter—words not meant to be said, but kept. “But I never miss a chance for the enemy to show its face.” And show its face it had.
Faces.
Bastards.
So, indeed, they march on in the unhallow and stagnant—deathly, sickly, nauseatingly stagnant—halls of her very own mind-prison! See here, the bones that festoon the dusty corners of this stone mausoleum. There, the urns that hold the ashes of some thousand-year-old-forgotten. A gawping, abeyant—somewhat-equine, more or less—figure, wrapped tightly in yellowed linen and smelling of something deeply unpleasant and alchemical. A crystalline sarcophagus upon a stone plinth; gilt and jewelled and it matters not what kind of pull the dead inside once had, for nobody gives a rat’s shit about them anymore.
Speaking of rats—there are none.
Small mercies.
She listens, and breaths a stifled and secret sigh of relief when he finally follows. Traitorous chimaera or no, he’s better company than her own thoughts. And besides, she knows how this story arch goes:
First, she is here. Just is. What comes before is far-away and irrelevant to what comes next;
Then, she screams. She screams for her Arete comrades. She screams for Zayir. She screams for her mother and father. She screams in pain and anger and those throes go on for days.
And then, she becomes silent, because nothing answers back but the corrupt reverb of her own voice. And besides, her throat begins to ache.
Then, she searches. She marches. She patrols, endlessly, through these labyrinthine halls until she thinks she finally remembers her way around—
And then, she mind begins to unravel. She is thirsty. Her voice feels like purple claws in her mouth. Her brain is like carnation-red silk, soft and sanguine. Her feet leave tattoos of holy-women, bare-breasted and semi-alive on the pearly floor.
Sand washes the soft cotton memories of babes.
The sun touches endless crystalline nests.
The last chapter is the real damnation.
When he offers his challenge, she huffs irritably under her breath, a tone that says, ‘face it, we have been consigned to darkness—get comfortable’ but she supposes it costs her nothing to play along. Her eyes waver to the glints of dull gold and bronze that the firelight catches—urns and tithes—losing their characteristic focus. Is it the bight of the Oasis, where her and Zayir played and argued? The gardens of Lady Arisetta, where she tumbled and bruised her knees as a girl (Umma would kiss the scrapes and tell her to harden up in the same breath)? Those all seemed too personal. Too close. So instead, she fishes for memories of her young adulthood, spent abroad.
The world around her seems stiff. Resistant. It rebels against her brain, growing darker, fires sputtering and hissing clear consternation—but along the stale air comes the faintest whiff of jasmine and pomegranate; ale and wine. Her brows knit together as she turns a corner, instinctively, though she cannot, on thinking back, recall if that passageway has ever been there before...
She glances back at Dune, eyeing the make and measure of him, like a general would their rows upon rows of soldiers. In time, she snorts softly and dispenses with the reticence, “You do not feel like anything I would come up with,” her deep, hard eyes narrow for a second, examining the curves and valleys of him, of this lucid walker. She tries to picture some man or woman she might have bedded, or killed; someone she may have run into on the streets. Something to elicit such a powerful and life-like reimagining.
But he does not ring a bell.
“I cannot imagine you would want to be in here with me so. Grave mistake, was it?” They wander on, but as they do, the redolence of some far-away kingdom grows stronger, and in the echoing halls of her dreams, the sound of chatter and laughter and clinking earthware hum like ghosts.
@Dune
MINOR POWERPLAYING IS PERMITTED
