[P] babylon burning

[Raziel]

R A Z I E L


—

T

here were not many Nazarets left. Seven to be exact -- though one did not count. Raziel could never remember her name. Was it Delia? Daya? Something beginning with D. Anyway, she was a bastard. According to Raoul (and his no doubt duplicitous sources) their aunt, Hosana, had spent the night with a soothsayer on the edge of the desert soon after her second birthday; unmarried and underage. He'd also overheard one of the butlers furtively broadcasting another version to the kitchen staff -- this one involved Raziel's own grandfather. He remembers wrinkling his nose. Over the years many stories circulated the city but once the girl was born and turned out to be positively ordinary (lacking disfigurement or conjury) the rabble lost interest. By the end it was determined that she was simply a mistake, nothing more.

So six, if you discount his half-cousin whose name escapes both of us. Poor duck. 

The most prominent of the six? Yamuna Nazaret. As the middle child of Elazar's three daughters, Yamuna had lived in Balsheva's shadow for years. That was, until she died. After the tragedy, Yamuna had worn black for just forty-eight hours, breaking the customary one month minimum, and Raziel can still recall the way she had cried a little too grandly at her husband's funeral. Everything about Yamuna was exaggerated: her garish canary-yellow corsets, her viciously-short buzzcut, her gold-on-silver teeth. The woman had assumed position as head of house faster than a peasant could say fuck Zolin and there she had stayed, like a splinter or a cockroach. Or both.

In any case, all of this lead Raziel to consider the likelihood of this stranger mistaking him for someone else in his family. Well, he wasn't a woman and he looked nothing like his male cousins. Slim, then. By no choice of his own they are even closer now and the sable unicorn does not hesitate to lean away from her as though wary of catching... something. Intimacy wasn't a flavour he liked the taste of.  

There is an echo of familiarity in the way the girl moves; a thought that has lost its way. It is fig-sweet and practised: a signature of the highborne. Gahenna rests her great obsidian skull upon her left paw, almost rolling her eyes: come on, Raz. The stallion swings his tail in languid annoyance. Has he become truly so detached that he cannot recognise an old face? When she leans in, smelling of magnolia and linen and summer-dusk, he does not realise he is holding his breath. 

Sol Hajakha. 

Morsels of the past drain through the tide of forgotten memories, soft and worn. They flash in colour, screening a dead world behind his eyes in short sharp bursts that end too soon for his cavernous heart to bear. And she is there: in the sand, with hair that might have been Caligo's and a laugh that could have been a hymn. At Raoul's side. Raziel sighs, releasing himself from a childhood he can only wish to forget. He straightens, "you look different." It is a stupid thing to say, he knows, but maybe he is just that: stupid and sad and never, ever sorry. Zolin's niece sits at his shoulder and somehow it feels, quite suddenly, like home. They glimmer in the noon-light, hangovers of an age where money talked and power sang and life was one long sordid carnival.

"I thought you were dead." His voice is flat like stone as he stares into the pit. The cages open and the crowd begins to swell. 

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Suffering can be religious if you do it right.

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