You wrap your name tight around my ribs
And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
Her own dependence is incipient.And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
Insidious.
She has always been bacchant—always took more than she could handle, then learned to handle it just fine. Violence—the slippery, coppery smell of blood and how it spoke of omens in the way it ran and pooled and tasted. Alcohol—because at the end of the day so few things mellow the vestiges of violence quite like it. Flesh—and in this, she was indiscriminate; what drink did not kill, lust did. Welcomed friends, all. Her, open-armed and hearted, as if there was nothing but space in a place so normally cold and impassable; in a space guarded with viper’s coil and venom’s promise, made uninhabitable by the anxiety that it could possibly be infiltrated. Possibly be shared.
Undoubtedly, it is because she was raised—born—to be a soldier. A leader. An iron-clad thing. A killer. Steel-tipped and unyielding; copper and bronze; atlatl and spear and scimitar, sickeningly elegant in her capacity to kill. Her penchant for life matched—notch for notch—by her affair with death, until neither really meant much to her anymore.
Or their meanings coalesced, and that’s when it became really complicated.
When she was born and bled, she was crowned in cacti-thorns and white-hot sun, and behold—for she is to lead armies of the blind-loyal! The voiceless-dogs! When it had been kings and queens she had believed in, it had been a yoke worth bearing against—(but had it really?)—when it was Zolin? Well, then it had taken on a barbed nature—it had become like playing with fire. The problem was, both sides felt the same way. The Arete might have shut their mouths, endured the childish reign knowing it would come to end, more like, swift than otherwise; they might have rebelled, run through the petulant bastard and his cohort of sackless yes-men.
But the boy-king?
He was always going to find a way to put them down.
It just happened to have been literally.
Life is poetic, sometimes.
And so, for 3,650 days and 3,650 nights—(give or take, you lost track around day 50… is that right?)—she wandered, like some husked ghoul, the dark and charnel halls of an underground mausoleum. A crypt of her very own; a solitary hermitage amongst the long-dead and long-forgotten. Fleshless and violence-less, drinkless. Eyeless. Boneless. Voiceless. Lifeless. Breathless. Less than everything. Think of hell and then think of nothing—accept that it is hard to truly fathom either unless you’ve been there yourself—then make them One.
Therefore, it can be appreciated, that when the lid of that arcane coffin had been flung open—not with a flood of bright, hallowed light, but at the end of blade—she had found much comfort in old friends. And then, perhaps, too much comfort.
In fact, the only comfort.
So, when The Viper Slayer does not offer the stranger a hoist of her wine it is not because she senses, in some clairvoyant way, that he has conquered a demon she’s best not to compel. It is because she has never been very good at sharing. And because she needs it too much, so if he wants some, he can bloody well buy his own. Instead, she uncorks it and brings the frosted, blue-green glass to her lips, tips her head black, and lets the pale pinkish liquid down her throat. When she is done a small droplet learns its way down her chin and jaw, the front of her throat, before ending on the ledge of her bronze neckpiece and dispersing across the cool curve of her neck. She swallows and grunts, before considering him with a keen, slightly heady, blue eye. “Mhmm.” The aureate, split skin of his hale, dusky shoulders and neck; slashed like a tear from the corner of his reserved, patrician gaze. She imagines his heart like a font of molten gold and wonders what it must feel like to be as gilt as she is bloodied.
How the sum total of pain added up between the two.
“Loud and uncouth,” she surmises—both, that Solterra’s flood of visitors were like weeds in a garden; but also, that he was like a well-pruned rosebush amongst wildflowers. Flows of two very different and incongruent tides. But, she supposes, she’s the snake in the undergrowth, so are they not all a quaint ecosystem? She shifts her weight and gestures, inviting him—for she is inviting, when a bit lubricated—to walk with her in the margins if he so chooses. At least he, in this soup of scents and blurs of colour, beadwork, textiles, spices, dialects unknown, is most certainly Solterran. “I suppose it’s good for business,” but it is painfully obvious that bit of small talk does not interest her.
“The name’s Cyrra, by the way,” she she begins, slowly, to take a step and he will join her, or otherwise disappear into the whirl.
MINOR POWERPLAYING IS PERMITTED
