You wrap your name tight around my ribs
And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
Charnel abyss hints on the scarred stranger-woman, like slips of ghosts clinging to the wind-woven lengths of her hair. And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
Even if she has forsaken them. Even if she has consigned them to a forgotten realm; a place of thick, sucking quicksand, swallowing deep into the guts of her being, the delicate and unlovely bones of her memory. In Cyrra’s arrogance and shared misery, The Viper Slayer thinks she can see it, see it all. Like a wreath of darkness slipping through the cracks around the stranger’s marred, militant form, flashing with tongues of endless, stygian halls and eyeless monuments. Those cracked and eroded marble iconography, eaten away at by time until their featureless faces could have been anyone.
Any one of her brothers or sister; any one of her many vanquished foes, coming stone-alive to avenge the hilt-depth of scimitar in their stomach or throat.
Her eyes narrow, brows knitting together in a hard, bitter recognition.
(You know her.
You also forget her.)
Cyrra shakes her head, watching with wary, severe blue eyes as the woman crosses the lurching rim of red stone, the precarious edge that they haunt with their memories—(with and without). She lets out a short, curt snort. A beware a stay back a who are you… Resigning to the idea that the sepulchral aura had simply been a figment of her own mind-prison, loosed demons of treachery, old as time and as arcane as whatever had come before.
(You follow.
You were not a follower. Are not.
But you did, anyway. You followed the Alkhiana, in a formation of your Arete comrades—Zayir. Halim. Cairo…—each seduced into a tomb of your own keeping; a unique lie spun from his lips to your ears.
What had he told you?
What had Arjun promised, with breath hot and slightly sour—and had you only known…)
She breathes deep, the sun drying slick, piquant sweat on the twitching, aching coils of her body; she squares herself, pale wings held out to the sun, the scant breeze—baking and desiccant—dissipating the heat stored between the tidy rows of misused feathers.
Her heart begins to slow. Begins to find its rhythm from the sun-baked ground, up; from the unflappable, vast expanse of hateful, beautiful waste around them. She had never forgotten her kinship to the dunes. That, the decade of personal hell, had not taken from her, though it had worked restless to take everything else around it.
It is knit into her soul, so apart of her that to unfurl it would be to steal the crux of her very essence. Would be to leave her loveless, hateless, sexless, bloodless and insensate, a barbed husk.
‘Why.’
Her bronzed lip twitches, ears roving from alert prick to testing the edges of her wild mane, peeling back against the curl of bronze encircling the base of the left.
‘What in there could tempt you so much?’
Cyrra considers for a quiet, still, tense moment, the woman—known and unknown—and the question. But the answer is patently obvious to her; like the lines of her muzzle, how they match the boundary planes, telling the story of centuries. Millenia. Of God’s hands and mortal triumph.
“Release.” The word is terse, iron around the edges, offered with no whimsy or cordiality, but with a promise and an offering and a tight, covetous grasp.
Her gaze wanders out, back across the desert as she contemplates whether or not it had worked as she had intended—as she had hoped. But this is a process, though she has never been patient, rather inclined to seek quick gratification. This cannot be undone in one harrowing climb, in one breathless kiss with the stark line between heaven and hell.
“What up here did you hope you would find?” Her eyes return, narrowing, searching, appraising.
(You know her.)
(You can recall how it had happened, from your perspective, at least—
Which is that darkness had eaten them up, one by one. But not their voices. Those lingered like tattoos in the air; like bruises, growing at first more vibrant in the echoing dark and then… faint.
Faint and then, gone.
And you had called their names.
Zayir, above all—
Halim—
Cairo—
...—
But they never called back, because each of you were death, stranded in your own sarcophagus, a thousand leagues under the sand.)
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@Hälla
@Hälla
MINOR POWERPLAYING IS PERMITTED
