i see everything;
that is my curse
that is my curse
Easy through the air as death’s scythe, the crowd falls away.
One second there are contenders, and then there aren’t—in less than a blink her competition wanes by half or more, and O does not care where they went, or why, or with who, only that they are not here to tussle with her.
She smiles, and it is like her mother’s, sharp and selfish and far too pretty.
The axe comes whirling back to her; as it soars through the air O reaches up and snatches it with the delicate edge of her teeth. Girl and weapon, one again! How good it feels. The pain in O’s chest is briefly replaced by a premature thrill of the victorious. They land with a crash of hooves on moving sand. She only narrowly avoids slipping into a newly opened rift, hooves losing traction for a heart stopping half-second, and then without a pause for breath she’s rushing forward again.
“Close,” Tuchulcha chirrups. If it could laugh, it would. Instead its voice reverberates with a giddy kind of satisfaction.
“The shadow of death, hm?” gasps Apolonia through her lacking breaths.
“You’re the meanest one in the valley,” the axe promises, and with a brief smile that pulls O’s lips dangerously close to the sharp edge of her blade she throws her head forward and they’re both off again.
The world is falling apart. O thinks of Anandi, unbidden. Overhead the sky is shredding itself into little ribbons of searing white and blue, and underfoot the earth itself is cracking and shearing like old bark, and, more pressing than either of these, the snake is rising like so many mosaics of god she has seen and rejected on the walls of the Solterran chapels. The bright, vicious eyes. The hidden threat of teeth. If there were a thing to be scared of, this would be it.
Her whole body shakes, alternatingly hot and cold, pleased and terrified. And in her mouth is the hot-white taste of copper punctuated by heartbeats like gunshot, but if she’s bleeding it doesn’t matter in the long run, it doesn’t slow her down by even a modicum; Tuchulcha is flying toward the relic and she’s following at a lung-bursting run and nothing else matters but the shine of the gold as it winks from oh-so-close.
She reaches.
