TRY TRY YOUR WHOLE LIFE TO BE RIGHTEOUS AND BE GOOD wind up on your own floor, choking on blood--
The streets of Solterra are quieter than usual.
It is midday, and hot. It is always hot in Solterra – even in the winter, in spite of the rare gusts of cool that come and go from time to time, in spite of the blizzard that ravaged the landscape only months ago. Flies buzz. In the distant, the low, hissing hum of the wind across the sands is barely audible. A few months ago, you would not be able to hear this howl inside of the walls of the capitol. Now, Solterra is hushed – her people muzzled by the monster that sat on the throne, wearing horseflesh. (They speak of him in whispers. He has aligned himself with the Davke. He sunk an entire ship of people, didn’t he? And his lover, that fire-girl. They say she burnt up on Veneror, burnt herself. Someone found what was left. Heard it in whispers. He exiled the Regent, didn’t he? Where did she go, that golden-girl, that Bexley Briar – to lick her wounds? He killed her lover. Did he make her bleed? He makes everyone bleed. And what about Denocte? Does he want us to go to war again? And we remember how it looked, how people would disappear and never come back; how the stalls in the market grew empty. How you would see people drift, on the sides of the road, skeletally thin. And our children. What did it do to our children?)
Everywhere there is residue. People grow thinner. They disappear altogether.
And she is the jackal at his heels, ravenous. She stalks his spies. Kills his soldiers, his guards – without much remorse, save maybe a few tears shed in the dark, when no one is looking. These are her people. Perhaps they are only trying to survive. She is a knife, well-carved and cutting as steel, colder and redder by the day. Violence erodes her like sandpaper; it grates her nerves. She – a girl, delusional – had thought, for a moment, that the violence might be over, eventually. If she fought for it. If she only did enough. But any faith that she had when she began this venture has disappeared like ashes on the wind, leaving behind nothing but an ugly black stain and the memory of smoke; her idealism lies like broken glass all around her, sharp and reflective. There will never be anything else for her, and, even when this is over, she will never be free from what she has done, or what she failed to do. More people are dead; more people are dying. Disappearing. Gone, far from her, out of her grasp – and, every day, it seems that fewer are willing to stand against the blood king, the silver shadow in the throne room. Then they will die like cowards, perhaps she thinks, because she knows that he will never stop, not with Denocte, not with his supposed allies, not with Solterra – not until he has seen the world crushed to dust beneath his hoof, and it will be no different from the deaths of the brave. She wishes that she could be like Isra, to proudly and blatantly fight the Blood King and his followers; she has heard about her stint in the market. Even with her magic, with her sharp objects and her training, which has never saved her from horrible things before, even with all her years of experience as a leader, she is still too weak to stand alone, to stand in the light; she is resigned to the darkness. (She knows that she will not be Solterra’s savior. She was its ruination. She. Raum. There is no difference; she let him in.) She has no illusions about her own heroism, or the heroism of her followers; she has already seen some of them dead. (Or turn traitor. The thought of Caine makes her skin crawl with disgust, her lips curl at the tips with a tension that borders on resent – almost at herself for being so easily deceived, rather than at him. Still a foolish girl, so easily twisted up and in on herself. Perhaps she’d compliment him on it, before she slit his throat.) At best, he will die. It will not undo the damage that he has already done, will not bring back all the things she struggled to create, will not salvage the lives that have already been lost.
(She thinks of Rhoswen, and something inside of her begs to sob, but she is far too numb to cry. She cannot cry. If she cries, she has already lost. She buries the heart inside of her and smothers it until it is quiet.)
Hope takes years to build. She watched it waver, then fall apart entirely, in the space of months.
She will find a figure that she is seeking on the streets, and she will scribble up a note, sheltered by the relative safety of alley walls; she does not want to provoke the guards. Once written, she will let it drift, twisting her mind around the thin scrap. The slip of paper will slink like a snake on the wind, twirling and sinuous; if offered nothing more than a passing glance, it certainly appears that it is merely being buffeted by the breeze, but, if you follow it with your eyes for a moment or two, you might realize that there is something deliberate to those serpentine movements. The letter will bob and drift until it hangs suspiciously in the air in front of El Toro, lingering tentatively for just long enough for him to grab it.
A look at its contents will provide a simple: Look up.
If he does as the letter requests, Toro will find himself starting at a dark figure in the middle of the alleyway, shaded by hanging canopies and tall buildings; though she is wrapped in a great expanse of golden scarf that largely obscures her features, if he meets her eyes from across the crowded street, perhaps he will recognize their bizarre, jewel-bright hues. She stands like the reaper, deliberate and solitary, then turns on her heel, disappearing down the alleyway with the slightest nod of her head.
The implication is clear. Follow me.
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
He is starving.
Proud warrior, reduced to hunger and bones.
(And rage. Always the rage, simmering underneath, it never leaves him, there is so much wrong-)
He is not alone. Hajduk trots at his heels always and he is hungry too. It is wrong to feed on the corpses of brethren before they burn, but when have these people ever been his brothers, his sisters?
Never.
Not when he and Seraphina defeated a sandwyrm.
Not when he and Seraphina and all those Solterrans charged against the frozen elk.
Not when they laugh at him, when they scorn him, when they let their feathers flutter in the breeze and sneer at him. Not one brother among them, no, not one who would fight alongside him in battle, never. No value for the life of silly El Toro-
(The lies of his anger twist and curl like a love letter on fire.)
Look at them - starving - in the streets - hungry - sick - weak - and El Toro does not know who to trust with his burning sentiment except Anzhelo and, hell, he can’t risk the life of the one person he knows is trying to do some good.
He got out to meet Anzhelo. Someone turned the walls to nothing and now guards swarm like wasps to a nest of missing bricks and diamonds. He couldn’t do that again. Now, when he has Hajduk. A cub, a child-thing, now he cannot help someone other than himself, not more than he already has, which was barely, Anzhelo could be dead - gods - why did he come back -
Something white twists across the air in front of him and he snatches it with his teeth, glancing over to the soldiers perching on the street corners like vultures.
Look up.
A figure in an alleyway.
Foreboding.
Hajduk puffs up like a cotton ball. (A cotton ball with ribs-)
El Toro sees those gemstone eyes and a shiver runs down his spine. ”Come on, Hajduk.” He does not need to say it but it means that he is not alone, even as he crosses a threshold slick with oil and fury. (Knowing him, he’d probably trip, his hoof against the rock would spark, set the world on fire-)
I'VE NOW SPOKEN FOR MANY WHO SPOKE TO ME We've changed what we could; but if you don't know you were fated can you know how light you are? I'm still going barefoot and so are my dead--
He follows her.
Even before he does, Seraphina thinks that he will. She does not know Toro well, though she has gathered his temper and his pride, and she knows that he has killed a sandwyrm, run alongside her with a god – the rest of him remains a mystery to her. But when she sees him, when she sees what he has been reduced to, she knows that he will follow. A warrior should not be starving for scraps at the hooves of a tyrant, left with nothing to fill his growling stomach but the rage. But that is where she is, too, isn’t it? The silver has gone haggard and hollow-eyed, and, if necessity would allow it, she would be skeletal – like some depictions she has seen of death, curled up beneath the gold of her hood. If it meant that more of her people would be fed, she would be happy to starve for their sake, even forego water as long as she could…
This was, after all, her fault.
But she needs to be a weapon, primed and polished and sharpened enough to spill blood. And weapons cannot quite be starving, so she is not all ribs, though hers are certainly visible. She wants to starve. She wants to hurt.
She wants to hurt, but, if she lets herself hurt as much as she would like, she will die, and she cannot fix this if she dies.
If she dies, he wins.
She walks the alley, her hooves an echo against the sandstone streets. It is quieter here, out of the crowds of the main streets, but it feels to her that the whole city is quiet, like some hunched animal, lying in wait – it is a silence that comes from near unbearable tension, an ulcer near bursting, rather than any palpable calm. The sun still beats down on her shoulders, but it is interrupted, on occasion, by the overhang of canopies and balconies on the higher stories of buildings. Doors are boarded up – windows, too. She is put in mind of a city during a plague.
When they have moved far from the main road, and when she is sure enough that they are alone, she turns to look at him, her face still shadowed by that golden hood. Her eyes dart the length of his frame, then move to the small, pale creature at his side. A lion cub, she thinks. (And, for a moment, she thinks of Maxence, the lionskin on his back-) As white as his bonded. Small, pitiful, starving – he is all ribs and soft fur. “A companion?” she inquires, with a curious tilt of her head; she hopes that the little one is less trouble than Ereshkigal. “I had to kill a teryr a few days ago, in the canyons – we’ll feed him.” It had been a messy, ugly situation – but one that could be solved more easily than she was comfortable with by using her telekinesis and her arrow. The carcass had yet to be devoured by wildlife, but few equines had use for the meat; she was glad that it could feed something.
But that was not why she had called on him. “I’m going to kill Raum,” she says, bluntly, and her voice is eerily calm. That is not to say that Seraphina is unconcerned by killing, though she doubts that Denocte’s Ghost would leave much of a stain on her conscience; but she knows what must be done, and she intends to do it. She sees no point in subterfuge. “He’s gone too far. But I can’t kill him on my own – will you help me?” Her request is simple, succinct; but there is a tremble to it, a quiet rage that is ill-contained beneath her steely composure.
He killed her, he killed her people, he was starving the cub and the man before her -
--
tags | @El Toro notes | many moons later, while you aren't even in a place to reply...
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
The city is a prison and only mice slip through the cracks in its walls, they say, but El Toro knows that he has done otherwise and when she turns on him and runs her voice through his ears he knows she has too. Toro nods. ”This is Hajduk. Thank you…” She lives and he does not know what else to say but he does not need to, not yet.
”I’m going to kill Raum.”
He thought the spy shenanigans would end with Anzhelo. They did not.
”He’s gone too far. But I can’t kill him on my own - will you help me?”
Soft air flushes through his nostrils; it is times like this where he still imagines his lung is a crushed paper bag and now his ribs curl in to puncture them both. ”Of course.” He paused. ”You won’t be the first. That - that I’ve aided in this…or attempted to. You know. I mean…there are more of you, then…?” It’s almost a question, but he knows the answer, he’s certain but perhaps not quite on the scale she has organized. He wants to ask her how she is alive. Instead he says, ”They say there is another bull, working for Raum. A…torturer…executioner…something.” He clears his throat. ”It is not me. I figure- that you know - but…we are not…the same.” In truth, he has not even seen this bull, rumored to be huge and black with horns like some apocalyptic creature. Sideways glances have increased exponentially; it seems that protruding ribs fill in when accompanied by horns. But those serving Raum know him to be a civilian. Being a bull grants him no status. He would only feed Hajduk with it, anyway. His home is now more of a haven than it has ever been, and yet more unsafe than before. Liquor bottles are buried beneath the ground with a handful of seeds and dried fruits, as if they could feed either of them for much longer. The white bull dreams of the pomegranates and ginger that once filled bowls on his windowsill, the cups of spices and hanging herbs that brushed against him while he cooked. There was something to it, that life. Something to this place that was seeping through the cracks and disappearing. He was missing the Solterra he had come to know.
His words fail him in favor of trying to clear his name. Say it.”I’m glad you’re alive.” He glances down at the little cub, who half-curls his form around Toro’s pale leg, gaze fixed on Seraphina. She smells like blood. Yes. But she is a good thing. Liar. You don’t know. Hajduk marches forward, paw prints seared black and hot into the ground. He spits a scratchy mewl at her, chest puffed. El Toro stifles a grin; he thinks this cub is the only thing keeping him sane now, and every day he fears some guard will snatch Hajduk away. Such beasts are walking weapons.
TRY TRY YOUR WHOLE LIFE TO BE RIGHTEOUS AND BE GOOD
