Somnolence shrouded the orb that was Kalinor’s Nest and within the interminable gloom of the subterranean city opal gloaming lights were winking to life one by one. Far and seven centuries of feet above, the earth was beginning to burgeon at the harsh hand of spring. A thaw had seized the ground, forcing mineral rich waters through the cracks in the world to eventually topple from the cavern ceiling and add fresh breadth to stalactites from which the spiders had formed their homes.
Though there was no way for Doryn Hardai to know it, the sun of which she had read was creeping steadily out of the east on green-gold feet, leaving behind a patchwork of light to nourish the wilderness. It was the same sun her mother had remembered with the determination of a prayer as her final hours waned and her belly waxed in the black. Liet Hardai had known both exile and what it was to be hunted prior to being taken for surrogacy by the Symenestra. Yet she had known other things as well, from what it was to lead to what it meant to love. Betrayal had bitten her bitterly, knifing teeth through her family and all those loyal to her husband. His ideals. Her endeavors. Their dreams. All slashed and shattered in the summer sun.
Being taken by the amoral ambitions of a desperate race had not been Liet’s life tragedy. It was instead just her coup de grace.
“You look like him,” the woman murmured while sinking to a seat on the edge of the bed. Dor had begun to surface from a restless sleep at the Symenestra’s entrance to her bedroom cell, shivering from her fetal position in a tangled nest of blankets. They were soft as down feathers, those blankets, soft as cobwebs and the sweep of pallid hair coiled with excruciating elegance atop the stranger's head.
Dor blinked with dark, hazy eyes at the woman, imagining she was one of the Nest’s many attendants with their airless smiles. She uncoiled to push into a sitting position and lean back against the array of bright colored pillows in her bed’s bower.
“Are you here to take me to the Place of Purging?” She asked while bidding her heart to be still. Pale fingers slid against the bedding, bunching silk in her fists. She blinked. “I look like who?”
“Your father,” the Symenestra answered while folding long fingered hands in her lap. Coal dark talons clattered softly together. “Oh, the coloring’s all wrong,” she went on, “And you’ve your mother’s face, but it’s in your bones.”
“My bones? What? Who are you –“
“Yes, your bones,” the woman rose her eyebrows, meeting Dor’s dark eyes directly with a regard that seemed to have been swallowed by the summer sun. “And your blood for those who know to look,
how to look. You’re his child and make no mistake.”
Dor felt bewitched and held herself in terrible stillness, the pressure of threat holding her sure as a straightjacket.
The Symenestra tilted her head, a small, sharp smile appearing on what were otherwise soft features. “Not even failure could cast your father down, but we’ve taken care of that now, haven’t we, Doryn?”
“W-Who are you?” Dor spluttered. The silver pendant gifted her by Duvalyon spilled from the neck of her shift as she leaned forward to search the face of the stranger.
“Narevelia Eglantine,” the lady introduced herself. "Wife of your brother's father."
Desperate questions voiced and left to wither in the air of this very cell swamped Dor's memory. Their tones still lingered in the flickering candlelight, the fresh, fair scents of the candles unsuccessful in the driving out of demons.
Do you know if I have a sister? Or a brother? Do they fly, Duv? Can you get them too? Old, mysterious forces listened in the womb of the earth, waiting amid the shadows of Kalinor, watching their own eyes. They threw out answers to lost questions only to watch them sink like stones into a mass grave.
"Why are you here?" Words found shape in her mouth, but every syllable hummed through the bones of her with which Narevelia seemed so enamored. The anguishes and shocks of the past days had piled too high, forcing her to accept that everything she knew was layered in lies.
"To see you," Narevelia considered, rising in an abrupt motion to pace at the foot of the bed. "To know you. Hellebore had no idea what he was doing, did he? But he's brilliant, eh? Did the perfect thing all the same." She shook her head and turned back to Dor and the bed, arms crossing beneath the swell of her breasts and head high. "Little matter now. You'll feed my purpose while your corpse feeds his child."
Cold crept through Dor, as stabbing deep as that scythe smile on Duvalyon's face.
No sedative will be necessary. "You're a traitor to your people," she mouthed, half mumbling the words for they dripped with sudden disgust.
Shock smacked Narevelia's exquisite face, covered quickly over by a tide of banked rage. "You know nothing, Doryn Hardai.
Nothing. Greater forces than I have hunted your father past the horizon, out of our reach; but I've my revenge through his wife's son. His daughter's child. They'll be Symenestra and they will
never sing to his gods."
"Viratas will smite you," Dor opined with an hiss. Her heart was beating too wildly -- wildly perhaps as the footsteps of a hunted man -- to cower in her fear and confusion. "I share your blood through your adopted son. You keep concepts of family bound up in physical forms alone when the god of it himself is intangible." One last thing Duvalyon had managed to teach her.
Narevelia was laughing, the sound so soft that the air of the Nest could have crushed it. It had crushed less fragile creatures than that sound. "You're going to die screaming," she informed the surrogate. "Far from the sun. An animal to breed. Don't speak of family, Doryn, not when you can't stop helping me destroy them." A dismissive hand cut the air and the Symenestra turned her back on her son's sister, stepping toward the door.
Animals were what the Symenestra considered the women who bore their children, who supported the continuity of their race. Animals maybe because it was a necessary crime to distance themselves from the horror of what they had been reduced to. Yet in them was the blood of all these animals, intermingled and passed from generation to generation, spread as intricate and sticky as cobwebs. Dor could not help but wonder then if in the Symenestra's pride they had raped and killed their way toward damnation in their own god's eyes.
There was a curse on them all.
Yet an animal, she was. The blood of her, the bones of her, as Narevelia Eglantine had said herself. And animals, when pushed to the wall, when caged and no scratching, no beating would tear them free, were distilled down to one thing: fight or flight. Broader thoughts banished by more banal instincts, Dor finally exploded beneath the pressure of seven hundred feet of waking earth.
Bed sheets tangled and tore as she half crawled, half flew from the bower, her hands scrambling for the candles wheezing in growing puddles of wax on the table. The first gasped out, extinguishing in a pale wisp of smoke, but the second tumbled to the bed and ignited upon the expensive silk, the weaves of cotton. The third candle was thrust into the bower drapery, a line of fire crimson bright as Dor's hair racing up to with a gulping exhale festoon the overhanging curtains into flame. Narevelia had spun around, staring with a reflection of flames in her eyes at this madness.
"What are you doing!" The Symenestra shrieked, surging forward. She caught Dor's arm with her hand, talons scraping porcelain skin, causing blood to burst forth when Dor jerked herself away. She tumbled to the floor of her cell, fingers scrabbling against the end of a burning blanket until she could jerk it loose. A wing of fire flared, littering scorched threads across the floor, and came to roost in the center of the thick rug cushioning the cell floor. Narevelia staggered backwards as the two-legged animal sprung, crashing them both against the far wall by the door. The hem of Dor's shift was burning, tiger colored flames crawling up until she jerked her leg, forced to release Narevelia while tugging and scratching at the clothes that bound her. Silk ripped, mouthy and incensed, and Narevelia screamed.
Beyond the walls of the cell, voices were raising with alarm. The door crashed open, revealing the form of a startled guard. It took but instants for the man to start yelling, shouting words that echoed and bounced through the Nest even while dragging Narevelia out. Smoke billowed after them as Dor danced and tore, escaping the burning shift they had dressed her in to prepare for the conception. The burning remains of the shift she threw after Narevelia, watching as fire raced toward fresh source of oxygen, the cell pulsing with heat like an oven. The hem of Narevelia's gown only fed Dor's fury, spreading fresh flames into the Nest, catching upon all of the fine, soft cottons, rugs and pillows, cushions and silken chains adorning the diseased heart of the Symenestra race.
As panicked screams braided in the abruptly bright din, surrogates and attendants all rushed for the stairs winding up toward the Nest's entrance in the ceiling. Guards and workers carried the animals made heavy with their children while the Symenestra defied gravity with the wiles of their race to scurry up the walls beyond which a clamor had begun to soar. The heat was debilitating, the smoke choking and blinding, leaving the cause for the inferno reeling in the leftover whirl of evacuation. A guard had latched onto her minutes ago, but she had clawed and kicked until he released her for the willing escapees.
Now Dor tripped across a table toppled in the surge for the exit, landing on a smoldering stretch of rug. The flickering maelstrom of fire light played tricks on her senses as did the heat and the lack of air, the symphony of sound pulsing its way into the dying Nest from the rest of rousted Kalinor.
It was as dizzying as the gorge. She could not tell which way was Up.
In her panicked scramble, her hands and then her knees stumbled across something heavy and soft. It moaned at her and that sound blended with a strange, tidal trembling that began to groan through the walls and the floor. The Nest itself was shuddering, domed walls weeping massive, dirty tears into the black of Kalinor. The stalactite was cracking, melting from the internal heat.
There came the sharp call of a Symenestra guard from above. "You! Hurry!" He said while hurrying through the hole in the ceiling, feet finding the remaining steps. "Here!"
Dor gazed down at the slack face of Narevelia Eglantine, sprawled and trampled by the hysteria of the exodus. Her head swam, pain prickled, and a portion of the far wall crumbled beneath the maw of fire.
"Here!" The guard screamed.
Dor twitched, teeth gritting against a thing both bitter and proud, and moved once more into action. Clumsy hands slid around the prone body of Narevelia, hauling the lady into her arms. Twisting, Dor struggled up the steps, dragging Narevelia with her while fresh oxygen slammed through the Nests crumbling walls and shoved the inferno into greater heights.
It roared, that fire, ancient and monstrous as any damned creature lurking in the bottom of the cave of the Symenestra city; and while it did, Dor thrust the still breathing body of her brother's adopted mother into the arms of the guard. His eyes widened on a point beyond her, sweat streaming his pale face. His eyes dropped to Dor and his arms tightened about Narevelia, hefting her into a cradle against his chest and feet staggering backwards, up the steps, up the wall itself.
"Hurry!" He shouted again, but it was too late.
The bottom of the steps collapsed, taking Dor with it. She slipped with angry tongues of fire, splintered furnishings and sparkling streams of melted minerals through the breaking floor of the Nest and into the black. Air thundered in her ears, blanketing the sound of her own screams. Above the Symestra swirled, water being cast too late on the implosion, evacuees absorbed into the arms of a stunned people. Dor fell and with her did a conflagration, shattering the pitch of the gorge like fireworks to illuminate a lower hell in hues of blood.
There may have been a god that was watching along with Viratas, one who knew too well the explosive nature of fury and grief.
Desperate hands scratched at her throat as she plummeted, sliding over the thick leather of the Ochya's collar, tangling into the delicate links of Duvalyon's silver chain. The pendant was branding hot in her palm, but the blade the physician had so carefully sharpened to a razor's edge sprung free on the third try. Screams had shrunk to gulping, mewing noises in her throat and she cut herself -- her fingers, a scrape to her neck -- before managing to saw through the collar. It felt an eternity, but it was in truth under a minute from the Nest's collapse to escaping the collar.
A different kind of light burst in the gloom, motes of magic spinning like a star scattered hurricane amid meteorites of fire. The glow coalesced in a matter of moments and when the falcon's wings were liberated of flesh and history they were trailing smoke and embers. A harsh caw shot like a cannon through the gorge, rebounding off distance walls to carry and drum as wings beat and beat and eventually bore Doryn Hardai up, up, up.
There might have those that saw the falcon rise from the falling ashes of the Nest and shoot like an arrow through the gloom toward the tunnels. It failed to matter to the falcon, however, for in her mind was a goal that blinded her to all else. It was the illustration of a summer sun in a book once shown her by Duvalyon. Somewhere between cowering and exploding, somewhere between sin and grace, girl and bird she had found the way to Up.
"S" is for spider, but also for sun.
I take you and pile high the memories.
Death will break her claws on some I keep.
- C. Sandburg.
OOCPlease note that both Poison and Colombina granted permission for the Nest’s destruction by fire.