by Rance » Wed Dec 12, 2012 6:53 pm
Gloria, what in the name of the Gods are you doing out here? It's cold and dark, and you hate horses--
Words from a familiar voice, stirring her from that vulnerable moment, when she realized she was just a girl, and there was a beast bearing down on her. She prayed that the mud, the filth -- the stuff Jernos were made of, like all creatures -- might protect her, but not from a creature with angry black stripes and orange the color of fire along its spine.
Blake's appearance startled her. "Blake--" the girl gasped, splattering with knees and elbows through the muck, her eyes flaring, seeping. "I thought I might speak to it, I thought I might make it understand I meant no harm!" Words spilled out of her like frantic sparks. She grabbed his boot, his pantleg, anything, shuddering hands holding, only as he said, "Run...now."
Foolish girl who wrote such letters, foolish girl who left such letters, she scrambled for the fences, a boot sucking off her foot in the slop, a heel crashing down on a tangled skirt-hem and tearing it free so it flapped like ribbons behind her. She had made it only several steps, before--
They sang one day in jerethedral choir, transported on the divine smoke of incense, and they were all so young, and their eyes shined with happiness and reverence as one of the Brothers,
he raised high
a jah'zoon hip-bone
and
drove it into the heart of a dune-hare
-- so perfect, so right -- and as the Brothers and Sisters of the Nameless lapped up the gore from the troughs, Gloria sang with praise, like all the little Jerno girls, and then the killing Brother stood high on the altar and praised the Glass Sands and the wonderful bounty once brought to them by a Growing Slave -- so wretched, so false -- and then a terrible Calamity befell them (she knew nothing of it, was far too young),
but they were all
so happy now
so she sang,
sang loud,
especially when the killing Brother said: "Hold chin aloft for the Nameless; remember you are Their creations, and They love you with vigilance, and that in your labors, your love, your life, you are strong by Their grace--"
Blake was there, and she had written such letters of him, and it made her sick with anger and betrayal, so ill with it that even as the striped beast bared forward, she could not run, could not just flee, no matter how much cold fear punched her from the inside and filled her stomach with acid.
"No," she whimpered, and then shouted: "No!" Because she would not let the scarred stableboy have this, not when he did not know what she had done, not when he had not yet read the note, her apology, her admission.
The striped beast had the eyes of a nightmare and its wounded, furious, bleeding, horrid rage.
Blake put his hand on an old sword, standing between her and the hungry claws.
The cha'har made to swipe. The seamstress -- stupid, afraid girl -- tried to right what all was wrong, and lunged for Blake, trying to snare the back of his collar, the back of his trousers, and drag him out of the thing's way, praying as good as a little choir-child.
"Do not hurt it," she begged him and the sky. "It is hurt -- it is afraid!"