and yes, you’re a too bright disease
The desert is where he is destined to die.
Don’t ask him for reasonings, he has none. Does anyone ever? No, he just has a feeling. That type of feeling that gnaws on the skull, fangs scraping against bone, loudest when it’s quiet - like here, in this endless sand. He first felt it in his youth, when he was but a boy. The memory is vivid when it comes:
He’s a gangly child again, legs too long and knees scraped raw from play, and he’s alone. His mother wasn’t neglectful by any means, but she certainly afforded her son more freedom than most parents ( more than most would ever think appropriate - but why worry? Her son was godtouched, what in the sand would dare show him anything but mercy?
Zakariah could never say they were close, in no short part because of this. She loved him as a mother should, but also in that same way a houndkeeper loves their prized dog. Her pride was hardly Zakariah’s to claim at all, not for his actions, but simply for the manner of his magic. He was something to behold, something to boast, something to display like a medal.
But she did love him. )
Anyway, he’d wander off like children do, except his mother would only watch him disappear from sight, confident he’d return at some point. The horizon has swallowed his herd before he’s realized, and he’s mostly alone now.
Mostly, because the ground shifts before him. He likens the way the sand falls off the serpent’s body to water, in waves. The viper is more frightened than he is, and Zakariah is foolish enough to lean closer to the low hiss it emits. It does not strike him. It makes no move to, either. It simply holds his gaze - eyes a green so brilliant you’d think them gemstones. In some way, its benevolence is more unsettling than aggression.
It doesn’t need to kill him.
It knows, one day, these sands will take him instead.
He’s always had a feeling, since that day. He thought of it ( dreamed of it ) often in the catacombs - some days so lucidly that the moments following him waking were feverish and panicked.
Zakariah wondered if this was what justice felt like.
It’s only when he exits the catacombs and revisits his home that he realizes justice is a myth, that karma was too fond of him. He’d have wasted away in that hell of his own making if either of those things existed, truly. He’d have died in the dark.
So he’s not really worried about actions, and their consequences. Not yet, anyway. He doesn’t think death will visit him anytime soon. But when it does, it will be in the sand.
And death must leave a soul hungry.
Because when he looks at the sun bleached bones before him, belonging to some long dead dog, they remind him of teeth. Bared, desperate, dangerous. A ghost, stubbornly huddled into its own corpse, snarling for another chance at life. He wants to help it. To tell it…
The gods are deaf, if they’re there at all. And you are best where you are, partly gone beneath the dunes, forgotten.
Zakariah regards the bones a moment longer, then hums a pensive note.
Will he, too, refuse his death? So violently, so silently?
... No. No, he was rightly full of life, wasn't he?
@tag / speaks / notes
