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 is consumed by the seething, heady crowd; gives herself to it.
Or what slips of herself that can be clawed back from the hard, vain cage of quiet, contained animus; from the scowl of lip and the narrowed, indignant slit of bright, sky-blue eye.
That scorched, elemental rage that had subsumed itself to her like venom as a young girl. First, as the fangs sunk deep into her knee. In the swimming, white-hot reverie that followed, as reached up to Solis and found she could wrap herself around the radiant, holy rays of Him to pull grace down upon herself like fiery armour; swirling into the Beyond-Beyond-The-Sand as a crusader. And second, before she lost grip of her consciousness, as she brought the small, curved janbiya down and pinned the writhing, furious stygian serpent to the dunes.
Blood pooled on the sun-baked sand, staining it a red so dark it was almost black.
She had died and come back that day.
El’Alafir-Uquaa.
The Serpent Slayer.
—died and come back many times after, too.
Cyrra shoulders inebriates out of her way with grunts and sharp, barbed stares, as day passes, bruise-purple and bright tangerine, into night. Her pale wings are held tight against her body, extending roughly now and then to claim distance between herself and the rabble. Moonlight begins to pool in the crowded streets as braziers and strings of lanterns are lit, one by one, offering their own oily, dancing light to the market streets; catching, warm and golden, in the burnished curves of her serpentine neckpiece.
She had awoken, moonstruck and feeble as a sprig grown in a place without light—a place where light goes to die—to a Solterra invaded. Inviting. Opened, like the arms of some indiscriminate lover, libertine and rowdy; redolent with spilt wine and ale, like petrichor, but sour and fermented. Sweat, bodies, exotic perfumes and something more. Something many-tongued and violent in its greed. Something she could not place her finger on, but could feel its heartbeat trying to match her own—warpaths and bedsheets; skin rent and skin touching.
All the trappings of the festival that she wished to lose herself in. To take and remake herself with; to replace the putrid, charnel abyss with music and brutality.
Anything, at all, to remind her she is alive.
To pull back the layers of swart and funereal aloneness.
A spare, elegant man, dressed in a hooded cloak of brilliantly vibrant beadwork, rings of jewelled gold in his nose and ears, approaches her, extending delicate, crystalline bottles of clear, suggestive attars—jasmine and oud, rose and saffron. ‘...Something cool for you, sayidat alnaar, to temper your flame—might I suggest honeysuckle and citrus…’ Her iron gaze lingers for a moment on the oils, listing in their glass containers as he tilts them back and forth slowly, beckoning.
She is jostled and groans, teeth clenching. She shakes her head curtly and hisses, “bother someone else,” before moving off, gripping herself all the more tightly. Guarded and ungiving in the dizzy night, she meanders, searching and seething; moving through pools of light and dark, merchants hawking fine jewellery and indelicate bottles of thick, homemade brews. The once-Arete, now errant ember of a dead sun, shakes her head to most but throws a couple of gold coins to a hard, aged man selling strange, floral wine in sea glass bottles.
(Then, she almost runs into you. Some wasted and wonton stranger bumps into her, slurs uncouth and bawdy apologies and disappears into the night-clad streets.)
She mutters a string of creative expletives, iron gaze falling on the gilt, gunmetal stranger, breath smelling of lotus, vanilla and alcohol; body as hard as coiled springs, “gods-damned tourists.”
here is dread under his skin, twisting and writhing like a dead-dying thing. It winds deeper to burrow beneath sinew and flesh, hemorrhaging under moonlight; he knows it will not be shaken from his bones now. It is too late.
You might be mistaken for thinking a man like Raziel, a man whelped upon the lap of luxury, bloated by the fortune of his house, would dread nothing. For what could plebeian fear could touch his god-gold heart?
But Raziel was no deity, numen or creator. He was not, would never be, free of mortal sensibility, no matter how fervently he might pray. The base desires of men and women were perhaps the only certainty they should bear in each long dark night. And Raziel? He was no different.
It had opened the door at noon. Sauntering between the white walls of his teeth and slipping down his throat with an arrogant familiarity. The music that drifted in east from the capitol on a low, sweaty breeze had only excited it so. Gahenna sensed it immediately, lifting her muzzle from the leopard-skin pouffe upon which she was sprawled (the autumn heat was a noose pulled slack) but the stallion had shaken his head as if to say 'don't'.
Now he is drowning. He had never learned to swim.
Festivals brought a myriad of opportunities to Solterra -- each one doused in salt and fire -- but to Raziel it meant only one thing; the one thing he could not have.
Alcohol.
When Zolin fell and his brother's head was severed like a thread cut loose, Raziel lost everything. Grief has never been the tragic poeticism portrayed by the great writers of bygone worlds. It is ugly and wet-mud-brown. It is dark decomposition and darker despair. It is waking at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, watching indifferently as another day dies before you ever had the chance to fill it with all the life that was slipping through your hands. The life that was not now any such thing, but time; endless, flat, agonizing time. It is not knowing how to speak, how to move, breathe or eat. It is simple in its method, and devastating in its force.
So when he had taken a shaking hand to the bottles tucked neatly inside his dead mother's cabinet, it had been in naked desperation. It, of course, was not the first time he had drunk; he was a teenager after all and even if he hadn't snuck out with it to the Baobab tree with Raoul at his side, the grandiose dinner parties thrown by the Nazaret had been anything but dry.
But he'd never needed it. Not like he'd needed it then and certainly not like he needed it now.
His favourite poison was (is) damassine: a spirit distilled from the Nazaret's private orchard of plums their ancestors had brought with them from the Orient. The aroma is strong and the taste stronger. An empty glass soon turned into empty glasses and later empty bottles, but the oblivion it awarded him was a mercy he could not quit.
It took almost losing Gahenna to realise the gravity of his dependence, but that was a story for another day.
Now three years sober, he stands on the outskirts of Solterra's revelry, watching on with a gaze that is both guarded and envious. The dread of this afternoon has turned into a barely-kept thirst; darkness has always been slippery and persuasive but he holds himself on a tight leash. At least that's what he tells himself.
The streets are ablaze with foreigners and nationals alike, though the wayfarers stick out like sore thumbs in gloves made of gold. The air is matted in smoke, booze and forms of other debauchery he cares not to think about. Raoul had always called him a prude and it had always irritated him, no doubt because it was true.
A girl catches his eye; a surprisingly rare thing for a man of his age and standing. She is caramel-honey and wide-winged, though it is not her looks (it never is) but the vitriol in her breath that hooks his mild interest. She grunts something about tourists and he does not respond. Instead he wonders why he has come so deep into the pit -- the inner city is not a place he often frequents; too many people, too much noise. Even his nose is not safe from assault - the fusion of malodours and perfumes clings to his nostrils like a glutinous leech.
Raziel's ear twitches backward as he considers turning for home (as if he hadn't only been here fifteen minutes) but he can hear Gahenna's voice already, telling him how mind-numbingly boring he has become. As it happens, his hound is not far away; hunting rats in a dark alley no doubt. So he stays, with a cocked hip and a discreet expression, letting the night draw in a little closer as he calls out evenly, “terrible, aren't they?”
Though, evidently, not as terrible as his social skills.
You wrap your name tight around my ribs
And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
Her own dependence is incipient.
Insidious.
She has always been bacchant—always took more than she could handle, then learned to handle it just fine. Violence—the slippery, coppery smell of blood and how it spoke of omens in the way it ran and pooled and tasted. Alcohol—because at the end of the day so few things mellow the vestiges of violence quite like it. Flesh—and in this, she was indiscriminate; what drink did not kill, lust did. Welcomed friends, all. Her, open-armed and hearted, as if there was nothing but space in a place so normally cold and impassable; in a space guarded with viper’s coil and venom’s promise, made uninhabitable by the anxiety that it could possibly be infiltrated. Possibly be shared.
Undoubtedly, it is because she was raised—born—to be a soldier. A leader. An iron-clad thing. A killer. Steel-tipped and unyielding; copper and bronze; atlatl and spear and scimitar, sickeningly elegant in her capacity to kill. Her penchant for life matched—notch for notch—by her affair with death, until neither really meant much to her anymore.
Or their meanings coalesced, and that’s when it became really complicated.
When she was born and bled, she was crowned in cacti-thorns and white-hot sun, and behold—for she is to lead armies of the blind-loyal! The voiceless-dogs! When it had been kings and queens she had believed in, it had been a yoke worth bearing against—(but had it really?)—when it was Zolin? Well, then it had taken on a barbed nature—it had become like playing with fire. The problem was, both sides felt the same way. The Arete might have shut their mouths, endured the childish reign knowing it would come to end, more like, swift than otherwise; they might have rebelled, run through the petulant bastard and his cohort of sackless yes-men.
But the boy-king?
He was always going to find a way to put them down.
It just happened to have been literally.
Life is poetic, sometimes.
And so, for 3,650 days and 3,650 nights—(give or take, you lost track around day 50… is that right?)—she wandered, like some husked ghoul, the dark and charnel halls of an underground mausoleum. A crypt of her very own; a solitary hermitage amongst the long-dead and long-forgotten. Fleshless and violence-less, drinkless. Eyeless. Boneless. Voiceless. Lifeless. Breathless. Less than everything. Think of hell and then think of nothing—accept that it is hard to truly fathom either unless you’ve been there yourself—then make them One.
Therefore, it can be appreciated, that when the lid of that arcane coffin had been flung open—not with a flood of bright, hallowed light, but at the end of blade—she had found much comfort in old friends. And then, perhaps, too much comfort.
In fact, the only comfort.
So, when The Viper Slayer does not offer the stranger a hoist of her wine it is not because she senses, in some clairvoyant way, that he has conquered a demon she’s best not to compel. It is because she has never been very good at sharing. And because she needs it too much, so if he wants some, he can bloody well buy his own. Instead, she uncorks it and brings the frosted, blue-green glass to her lips, tips her head black, and lets the pale pinkish liquid down her throat. When she is done a small droplet learns its way down her chin and jaw, the front of her throat, before ending on the ledge of her bronze neckpiece and dispersing across the cool curve of her neck. She swallows and grunts, before considering him with a keen, slightly heady, blue eye. “Mhmm.” The aureate, split skin of his hale, dusky shoulders and neck; slashed like a tear from the corner of his reserved, patrician gaze. She imagines his heart like a font of molten gold and wonders what it must feel like to be as gilt as she is bloodied.
How the sum total of pain added up between the two.
“Loud and uncouth,” she surmises—both, that Solterra’s flood of visitors were like weeds in a garden; but also, that he was like a well-pruned rosebush amongst wildflowers. Flows of two very different and incongruent tides. But, she supposes, she’s the snake in the undergrowth, so are they not all a quaint ecosystem? She shifts her weight and gestures, inviting him—for she is inviting, when a bit lubricated—to walk with her in the margins if he so chooses. At least he, in this soup of scents and blurs of colour, beadwork, textiles, spices, dialects unknown, is most certainly Solterran. “I suppose it’s good for business,” but it is painfully obvious that bit of small talk does not interest her.
“The name’s Cyrra, by the way,” she she begins, slowly, to take a step and he will join her, or otherwise disappear into the whirl.
he space between them purrs with the promise of something dahlia-bright and bloodied. He can feel it: the way it twitches like skin under flies and pulls him in three inches closer. As he does step forward, the breeze picks up and warns him of the secrets hidden under stygian lashes. There is death in her hair, not in the classic sense of heaven, hell and white demise but something that smelled like moss-growing hesitation; the death of years spent under rubble and renaissance.
But it doesn't stop him from hanging like a spider on a thread, carnivorous and patient. He cannot know of the tragedy she has endured, just as she cannot know of his and it is likely that neither should care to change the fact. Their histories, his estranged and hers sepulchral, are tattooed onto the bottom of their feet like fine print on a bottle. By the time it is read, it is often far too late.
The Nazaret man watches quietly as the decanter rises above her head and releases its inebriant into that hungry, endless mouth.
Dangerous.
He can almost taste the smack of it, can almost see his wine-stained teeth in the mirror.
A single tear falls from the hollow between lip and rim and laughs at him in shades of scarlet as it courses down a throat he does not see. She is invisible as he stands in darkness; blinded by the sight of his weakness.
But he is struck into seeing by the dark-rimmed voice that address him, a voice that sounds granular and dusty; as though it were rough with disuse. His eyes find her again. He breathes.
On a different night he wouldn't have followed her, this girl with wings and too-blue eyes. On a different night he would have simply watched her vanish into the humming crowd like a light burned out, but upon this eve Raziel melts into her shadow as though she were Gahenna -- as though he was not utterly alone. His chest hitches a little, yielding against the alien movement of his long wolfish limbs, and it takes a little more from him with every fluid step.
![[Image: deadj5s-7ea0ce6c-63ed-494d-a2b1-1ea29d98..._KYezSKapw]](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/62895f4e-8c60-4924-a6f1-54bf30743d42/deadj5s-7ea0ce6c-63ed-494d-a2b1-1ea29d98adc1.png?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOiIsImlzcyI6InVybjphcHA6Iiwib2JqIjpbW3sicGF0aCI6IlwvZlwvNjI4OTVmNGUtOGM2MC00OTI0LWE2ZjEtNTRiZjMwNzQzZDQyXC9kZWFkajVzLTdlYTBjZTZjLTYzZWQtNDk0ZC1hMmIxLTFlYTI5ZDk4YWRjMS5wbmcifV1dLCJhdWQiOlsidXJuOnNlcnZpY2U6ZmlsZS5kb3dubG9hZCJdfQ.No4YMruHY_LHkiZwS9oVnGKGelURHdwU3_KYezSKapw)
