In loving me
you hold a knife at my throat
you hold a knife at my throat
S
weat drips as blood down my neck, winding further and further away from pale, braided hair. It is tight along the arch of my neck, pressed into skin, pulled into a shape meant more for war than mere practice or daily life. The only indication of who I am, what I am (for I am starlight, I am terror incarnate, I am Death), is the golden circlet pierced by a single arrow just behind my ears. My father places it there daily when I do not, but by now it is more ritual than anything to put it in my hair.Everyone in my family wears something along these lines. Some bear constellations, some insignias of battle, but all of us are star-forged and fierce. Ready for when the Courts turn against one another once more. Ready for when another tyrant rises and must fall. Ready for when the skies scream and monsters rain down onto all that we know.
The Dumas will not let Terrastella fall.
Years before, they stood strong by Vespera. They whispered her words into the world as they came to the battlefields, they prayed to her for glory and life, they prayed to her for victory. Their prayers were answered generation after generation. Even now, we pray to her still.
And it is her body of dusk that coats my home in swarthy shades of starlight and sunsets. They mingle flirtatiously on the walls that are far from the fields I now train in.
Another pull of my muscles as I thrust forward. The man before me is nameless, near faceless. I do not need to know him to defeat him. When we fight, we will not know those we kill so intimately, so I do not care for him before me now.
Satisfaction purrs through me when I hear his labored breathing, the flash of triumph is quick and biting as he falls to the ground with a cry, and I am sure the smile on my lips is all teeth with nothing gentle nor friendly. ”Well fought,” I intone, leaning down to pull the man up regardless of his namelessness, his lack of station.
In these fields where bodies press against bodies, coming together in a thunderous show, we are all Warriors of Vespera. I let that settle gladly in my stomach, let it curl over the ashy thoughts of a brown and red woman that could look like any one of these soldiers, let Solterra fade like the sun in the sky.
She is the past.
This is my future. { @Aeon "speaks" notes: <3 }
