You wrap your name tight around my ribs
And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
She once hurled sand in Zayir’s eyes here.
They had been playing as children, rough-housing, testing their edges against the mettle of one another. That she had not meant to do. The bruises and scrapes, the kicks and bites and bloody noses. Those were gifts. Those were part and parcel of their cutthroat relationship growing up. They were laughed off, or they were argued over. Or they were left as great, looming, seething silences that went on for days and days, darkening the gardens and halls and streets between them until it was deemed enough.
The sand thing had been an accident.
Her bitter, venomous temper had manifested itself in the swill of sand that gathered in the air around her legs, bent to the heaving pulse of her volatility and emotions.
That’s gone now. Stripped from her, stitch by stitch, until she had been reborn a different woman entirely. A breathing, blooded body, moored of mind to a dead underworld, carried like a bony passenger back into the land of the living. It had taken and taken, and now the Traitors had more to answer for than just the untold years of her life and the way they had cast ghosts into her body like she had been nothing.
Like she hadn’t held a shield and spear to their backs.
Like she hadn’t called them brother.
The dunes lay, inanimate formations of senseless particles, beneath her, cleaved from the arcane seam they had once shared. She commands them no more.
The Viper Slayer weaves through the clutches of palm and cirus trees, verdant agave and pale, mauve sage, that wreathes the bright blue pool of Vitae.The giving-waters of Solis, the altar upon which life descends to genuflect with dripping mouths. She does so now, dropping her head down to drink and to ponder the strangeness of her being here at all. The sun glints hard and hot off the burnished copper of her serpentine neckpiece; crawls the tight, militant geometry of her body. Her wings are tucked tight against her body, her stony, blue eyes are somehow both distant and alert, both here and there.
Alive and unalive.
But it is the slip of sand, the purchase of hoof on stone, the brush of skin and feather against rough bark and thick, rubbery leaves, that draws her from her worship. Her ears tip, nostrils flaring, water drops down her throat as she raises her head to observe—You. “Cairo.” Her voice is flat and severe, but the small smile that tips one side of her umber lips is vaguely amused.
He was born alone, amidst twigs and bones, atop a tall, tall canyon with its contoured face of sand dunes. The sun baked down on him that day as he hatched out from the pale grey shell within which he had been curled. His teryr mother was off hunting, yet she met her death, struck through by spears and arrows. Or at least this is what the rumours say.
Though maybe there is some truth to them, for Cairo is most at home where sand nestles deep into his coat and his feathers catch the hot desert winds. Maybe it is teryr blood that surges through his veins and calls him out into the open where the land is parched and the sky is endless in her reaching from distant horizon to distant horizon.
Cyrra is almost an illusion as the midday heat rises toward its peak and sets the air to trembling. The serpent necklace about her throat seems to come to life where it glints in the sun. The sun breathes life to the copper metal and for a moment Cairo thinks he sees it slithering around the elegant column of her throat.
The Viper Slayer.
The words are upon his tongue, their familiar ring whispered in his ears like all the voices who whisper the name as she passes. Cairo’s wings dip and the aquiline warrior sinks from the sky, slow and elegant. Light reflects across Cyrra’s coat as the pool ripples with the touch of her lips.
He lands light as an eagle amidst the verdant grasses. Slowly the Arete pushes through the flat waxy leaves of the oasis plants. Leonine he stalks toward her, his tail twitching, twitching over sand-strewn grasses. His golden gaze upon her is avian, sharp as a beak tap, tap, tapping its way up her spine.
His name tumbling from her lips is almost like a prayer. The pool sings as water drips off her chin. Cairo languidly watches the next drop gather at her lips, rolling to her chin and clinging until it drops, suddenly. Once gone, the man’s eyes flick up, setting hre ablaze in the light of his sunbright gaze.
“Cyrra,” Cairo replies, as if her name is water to his parched throat. “I heard you had awoken too.” He did not afford even Zayir a touch of greeting and he does not offer Cyrra any now. She knows too much of him, his deeds, the constant bodies in his bed who were never the one he really wanted.
They hold each other’s gaze, even as another droplet rolls down the groove of her throat. “I still feel the vestiges of that fetid magic. It lingers at my edges, wearying me.” His words are the cut of talons, directed not at Cyrra but at the magic that cast them all into a statue’s sleep for too, too long. “Do you feel it too?” He murmurs low, like whiskey, ragged like the gathering cry of a teryr’s rage.
You wrap your name tight around my ribs
And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
Zayir had mentioned Cairo among the roll-call of the living-damned when he came upon Cyrra and the… rather unfortunate circumstances surrounding her reawakening (which implies she had ever been asleep… not so; if only). Cairo. Somehow, she hadn’t been surprised. He always did—does, even now it seems to her, as he alights upon her life again, hawklike and striking—seem to have a sort of… hunger. Was it for life? It was overindulgent and self-serving—enough, she thinks, to have kept him alive and well enough.
That hunger—not unlike her own, but maybe that’s why it bothers her so; looking in a mirror can be hard—had been a subject of many an unhappy, explicit mutterings from the Viper Slayer. It was, truth be told, tiring to watch the dance him and Zayir, so like a brother to her, had entangled themselves in. Pushing and pulling. Ducking and diving.
It was enough to drive a girl to drink.
...that all seems soo distant, now. It all seems trifle and petty... silly, in the grand scheme of things, really. In the deep-dark, she would have given anything—laid her scimitar down for good; swore off all of her vices—to play audience to their restless games again. To sit to the side as everyone around her squabbled and hurt themselves and each other—(you did just the same, don’t lie to yourself)—just to feel in control. Or to feel less lonely. Or more lonely, if they were so inclined to a spot of masochism.
And many of them were.
She smiles, a little looser now, but always sharp. Always tight like a snake—scaled and barbed and fanged, never quite making it to pleasure, or joy. Not while the sun is still shining, anyway. She would be compelled to greet him as a brother. With enthusiasm and with a vibrance that would likely stun him a little, so unlike her it would be; too familiar, but she steels herself. That’s what an endless, dust-filled solitude does to you—it makes you appreciate the way your name sounds on some else’s lips. So different, so much more enjoyable, than the way it sounds as you scream it into the charnel abyss, just so that you don’t forget it yourself.
‘I heard you had awoken too.’ She grunts in reply, wonders if Zayir has told him the state he had found her in—warm, sticky, fresh blood dripping down her chest. Had it not been another Arete’s blood, it may have just been another successful night out after a decade of entombment. As it were, Halim’s body slumped at her feet had given it away. Her breath hitches for a moment—she holds it all it; she’d be damned if she let Cairo see her faltering—thinking about those wild, crazy eyes. Knowing full well they could have been hers. Had been, in her own personal hell.
She appreciates his teryr’s ire—she had found Zayir maddeningly calm.
Her lip twitches as he speaks, as he describes the way the shadows around her sometimes become darker. Sometimes become fouler—putrid and dusty, stagnant and above all else… cavernous. Abyssal. She does not break eye contact, but her heart begins to pump, hot as sun-fire in her veins; her teeth clenching, popping striations of muscle along her jaw. “It clings,” she nearly spits the last word out, “I go back there every time I dream.”
She had imagined pressing her blade to Zakariah or Arjun’s throat, time and time again. Held on to it, like the dying ember of the final flame as she marched the labyrinthine halls of the arcane mausoleum Zakariah had made, just for her. Zayir had wondered if they ended up sealing themselves away with their own magic—posited that Zolin would have never have let his pawns see the light of day, themselves.
If so, mores the shame.
“I’d like to wear their bastard skulls as helms into my next battle.” Her brow cocks, and before she leans down to take another quick sip of water, “just one idea, anyway.”
She grunts, unengaging, but Cairo still feels the way her response resonates deep into his soul. It did not engage him, but oh behind that one gesture is a whole wealth of unspoken words. The picture, he thinks is a terrible one. It is chasm deep with all of its layers and horrors.
They had all been buried, separated and slumbering. He does not know, he has not hard word yet of how she had not slept. She was awake the whole time. It would chase the smile from his lips, if he knew. But he does not, because Cyrra, ever brave, bold Cyrra carefully folds her pain away, and focusses it into violent retorts.
I’d like to wear their bastard skulls as helms into my next battle. He smiles, menacing, indulgent, rejoicing in her vindictiveness. “I like the idea.” He murmurs, feline, though the eyes that watch her remain sharp as an eagle’s talons. She drinks briefly, but the silence is enough for him to think, to imagine such a vendetta. “I would help you.” He muses, lightly. Yet deep, below the tranquil surface is a raging current. “Yet after, I would trample their skulls amidst the ruins of our foe. I would not want even their skulls to partake of our victory.”
Such violent ideas pass between them so casually as he tilts his head to peer at the water. Water. He went a decade without wetting his throat. The first taste past his lips had been liquor. Even as he watches her drink, he knows he needs something stronger. But Cyrra has always been, better. Wearily watching Zayir and Cairo’s endless push and pull. “I saw Zayir earlier.” Cairo adds, casual, too casual for how he left him, drunk amidst the dancing, failing to answer and only fulfilling Zayir’s question of why he left, always.
A moment passes as Cairo watches the sun, the water, the endless desert beyond the oasis. “I do not know what to do now.” He says, vulnerably, of life within Solterra, of his love for Zayir, of how to live after, after a decade of nothing.
