All the gods are dead and their bones are not in the mountain buried in the frozen winter stone.
The north star is in the stone.
And she is broken.
Time has ticked away and she has been unable to grasp the hours, and minutes and second. There is no sunlight, or moonlight, or firelight, by which she might count the moments of her suffering. All she has are drops of her blood to count the hours (and there are so few drops left to fall from her).
Drop. One. Drop. Two. Drop. Three.
Between the drops there are the roar of a leopard chained with her ribs slat-sided with hunger.
And between the roar there are the laments of feathers dreaming of the winter air of the cosmic coil. Those dreams are threads of blackness, of crow-faced boys with teeth that smile instead of snarl, of wine scattered across the ground in place of seeds. She waivers between the three as another thread without shine and a knot. If she is anything but a thread on the wind in the darkness she has forgotten what it is.
There is only blood, and pain, and leopard hunger, and the lament of a chewed out star.
Between the only things that there are Warset is awake in the newborn dawn. Her eyes are thick with salt and quicksilver. Each feather in her wings, as they flutter uselessly at her sides, is more torn up than the last. Cruelty is a heavy cloak on her form, an oil thickening her blood, a tear catching in the hollows of her cheekbones. She wears each more gracefully than the last. She is a masterpiece of suffering, and mortality, and broken glass wickedness.
And if there is a name on her tongue, and a song of save me, save me, help me, she does not know how to form the sounds of it with her thick tongue parched of water. All there is the image of a dark pegasus, and a desert boy, super imposed in the places between the constellations etched across the backs of her eyelids. Their names are beyond her.
But the dawn is trickling in through the cracks of her mountain-belly cell. The spiderwebs are dusted in frost and rose-gold and today, this morning, her world is not as bleak as it was the night before. She hums. Her lips feel like a cage of wasps as she sings a song of a hunter caught in a wheel with their prey. The wheel spins, and spins, and spins, and she does not know how to free herself from her.
Outside her blood is glittering silver in the dawn-light where the stone has been watered by her misery. Outside there is no dragon, or stallion, to guard her brutal cage of suffering. The devils have wandered from their inferno.
And inside, in the darkness cracking with light, Warset lifts her eyes to the crack in the stone and lets her song turn to the war-cry scream of the suffering and the hopeless.
@Caine
