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The citadel is full of light.
Even though it is the darkest hours before a bloody red dawn, starlight floods through the stained glass pane windows in brilliant, gleaming rays that wash the roughly hewn sandstone floor in shades of silver and gray.
He is out of place, she thinks, gazing at the red stone hewn from the desert and the cavernous space flooded with light. She can only imagine how the sun sets the citadel ablaze in the morning and midday hours. He floats through the candle-lit halls like a ghost who has haunted these corridors over a lifetime, but never graced them in the light of day. The silver man is smooth in his stride and possessing all the hubris of a fallen king of old. The snake is nowhere to be seen.
She is led into an elegant but simply furnished room. An interesting scent (but indiscernible) wafts in the air with the perfume of the luxurious candles lit on the embroidered velvet tablecloth. Her stomach cries out in anguish against her will. The ship’s supplies had run low during the three month journey. She does not remember the last time she ate.
The guards deposit her at the table and then step back into the flickering shadows. Her chains remain. The skin is raw and her ankles are swollen. Somehow, the sting of imprisonment no longer registers, as if she is an old friend to such conditions. It is not the first time she has been chained—she is not so naive to think it will be the last, either.
The man with dead eyes is at the opposite end of the table, watching her with something resembling vague amusement and boredom, as if she is merely his entertainment for the time being, perhaps to be disposed of when she is no longer of any amusement or interest to him. She does not take her eyes off him. He is at home here in the darkness, here amid moon and starlight and silver washed tiles, but does he cringe from the morning sun’s knowing rays?
Eat.
It is not a suggestion.
She glances at the lavish feast laid out before her. Silver plates and crystal goblets glimmer in the gentle illumination of flickering candle-light. Her stomach clenches uncomfortably at the sight of the dish in front of her. The red meat still steams with heat and liquid fat pools on platter. There are no greens in sight—no apples, no rarity of oranges and berries…
Only the wrong, wrong, wrongness of meat.
And yet, the emptiness of her stomach is merciless.
She meets his dead eyes and sinks her teeth into the unknown flesh.
Ruby-red juice dribbles down her chin. She does not look away from the diamond-hard, unfathomable planes of his face as she eats. The taste is alien. The taste is wrong. She eats anyway. She has not watched her sisters burn, Erebos imprisoned, and sailed three thousand miles for nothing. She devours the wrongness of the meat like a wild animal until her plate is slicked clean. She drains a goblet of what she assumes is wine. Perhaps it is watered-down blood. At this point she doesn’t care to know.
Only then, after her belly is gorged and bloated, does she regain some semblance of an elegant lady instead of a wild, savage creature governed by the brink of starvation and desperation. She blots her chin with a pristine ivory napkin. The napkin falls to the table, beaded with scarlet pearls of fleshy juice.
Raum, King of Solterra.
“I am Polyxena,” she says, then pauses. She considers her next words carefully. It would do no good to lie, she has no doubt that he can see through such frivolities and she doesn’t consider herself a liar anyhow. “Where I am from my kind is burned alive.” Or worse. She feels strangely naked, stripped of the armor of her magic and the company of Erebos. She tilts her head, clearly curious about something. The pendant pulses warm and sure against her skin. She studies him closely for a reaction as she suggests: “Even a king would not be safe from the flames."
P O L Y X E N A
oh, I drain your life 'til there's
nothing left but your blood shot eyes
oh, I take my time 'til I show you how I feel inside
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03-31-2019, 07:01 PM
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