Fell crimson moth in thy little gleamsilk cage
What today the texture of thy fine murderous plumage?
What shape thy sly talons, blindly grasping escape?
In the dreamlike, waking hours before she set foot in the arena, when she could see the grass slowly turning blue outside her and window with the daylight and listen to the Giershrike's whirruping warning of the impending dawn, Askara wrote her death
sakta
. The artful script she'd once regarded with boredom was now a personal treasure, a lock that none outside her gilded cage could crack; the soft clay tablets had been a chore at first for symbols meant to be painted upon palm leaves.
'neath the prickling heat of the noonday glare at odds with the frigid breath crawling off the IonΙssaq River she was a velvet wasp preying upon a wind scorpion; she stung him beneath his bronze shell, sliding like a lover amidst his organs stirring them free; they slid forth like a child's pageant of dangling, fanciful red bags as his knees buckled. Her flight moved the cold hearts of the gold-adorned mantids, waterbugs and dragonflies watching from gilt stands of frilled brass, fluttering their approval.
When congeals thy oiled spirit unto dread definition
Shallt thou dazzle them nauseated with thy gory wings?
Or this day do you soar into flame?
Held together by ingenious, hinged rings of bone - an innovation her noble masters had stolen from the now extinguished people of
TsraΙ²
- she'd grouped them by their 10s. Sitting back and looking upon her half completed paen to her own mortality, she contemplated the quality of her work; once her regentess had regarded her work as 'paltry' and 'often tawdry', but she'd moved beyond the careless linen-swaddled little flower she'd once been and become...a poet.
Askara's sly claws ripped the lance from the wind scorpion's armored digits, which were busy with the work of scooping his victuals back into his belly; longer than the fine stinger of bronze that had parted her nameless foe's taut belly, she whirled like one of her Masters' dancing girls, the spear her tall, limber partner. The scorpion's brother in arms, a cautious garden spider clenching his axe's haft like a branch, tracked a wary circle around her vermillion and violet art.
Gold it dances, burnt and burnished blue
Glorious agony in Agna's embrace, thy ultimate rite
Blinded by victories' hoary years, free at last
Her dust-caked fingers - the nine that remained - carried the tablet like a newborn from her humble lectern to the stone plinth beneath her window that would, in an hour, be bathed in sunlight. It was the thirtieth she'd written, and awkward pride knotted itself in her chest like a ribbon. Thirty times she'd commemorated her death in the manner of a warrior, like daubing makeup over her servitude, and that many times had blood washed it away, leaving her a slave.
She pre-empted his long-limbed gait, awaiting the footfall that would stir his balance and she uncoiled the muscles of her right arm, the lance whipping an arc for his legs but the garden spider's fear filled him with alacrity. A hop that carried him over the leaf-blade, and despite his ungainly landing the axe-blade caught the spearhead against the ground in a downward arc. A backward flutter as she released the lance, his weapon's passage a zephyr against her chin; coiled like a whip, she sprang forth to bear him unto the ground, rolling to his screams as she dug deep her stinger in his heart.
Her wry smile was joyless as a hungry night, reflected back at her in the still pool occupying the center of her quarters. Her shoulder length hair fell in coiled tendrils past the strong, defined jaw she inherited from her father. Her umber, scarred skin was at odds with the pale, rosy pallor of her captors...it had been rounder once, soft like a woman of peerage should be; even her name had been gentler before she'd taken a new one.
Once she'd worn a soft robe of flesh and privilege beneath silks and gold chains; carried upon the shoulders of lower-caste in a palanquin of bamboo and cushions bulging with cotton like a stuffed prawn. Now there was barely a digit's worth of softness clinging to her frame, hardened like an oak training spar in Winter. Her flat belly was scored with muscle-lines like a war god's idol, her hips flaring outward - beneath the red linen panels of her loincloth her posterior formed a taut convex; in her yielding, plush life of indolent lounging broken up by fits of strangling court drama, she'd been as the pale flesh of a lychee, lush and eager to soak the lips of a strapping young noble.
That beauty had been pared away by the lash of Daevite servitude and, when she'd proven to her new mistress she was possessed of an unyielding will to kill in the name of survival, the arena had painted sinew and strength over skin and bone. Her breasts, once heavy and soft, were now far too firm and round for a lady; thighs once pillowed and tender for questing lips and fingers were defined by a line of muscle that ran suggestively to her groin.
Sliding her meager garments from her frame, she stepped into the cool water, and her small, dark nipples hardened in response. Filled up to her hipbone, the sandstone gritty beneath her bared feet, she bent forward and stared at the water, inches from her face, clapping her hands to splash it over her eyes. The challenge had always been not to flinch, not to blink - an errant movement of her eyelids had cost her a little finger fourteen months prior, and its phantom presence still ached.
"Hesitation is death," she breathed to the ripples; her eyes burned.
"Pity is death." Askara clapped again, gritting her teeth against bodily reflex.
"Now I am become a dread wasp, and bite without regret." A final clap...followed by another, another until she was churning the water and pretending that she hadn't been turned into this murderous thing, like an Ashura had been forced down her throat and into the space where dwelt her soul. That which had once been a tender, loving flower was mutating into a brambled, blood-soaked tree hanging with the corpses of people she couldn't even call enemy.
Askara had always eschewed armor - her claim, of course, that it interrupted the flow of her virtuosity was a cover for the simple fact that it chafed - but instead adorned herself as befitted whatever role she adopted. Emerging from the water, tears streaming gladly down her cheeks and dripping from her chin to her breasts, she clad herself in a skirt of red pteryges, lined in soft, crimson velvet. Over the supple grace of her neck, the slave draped a broad collar of red-painted lamelles, lined in black, rolled cotton; her breasts she bound in a simple strip of leather she'd painted red. With crimson and vanta pastes, mixed with rosewater, she painted edges and lines upon her jaw, over her lips and eyes to give her a vespid aspect.
At the entrance of her quarters, a key turned in its latch, the lock to her gilded cage creaking open as her mistress' claviger tapped the end of his ranseur twice against the stone floor. She never stopped smiling as she turned to regard the Daevite, looming over her by a few hands like some milk-pale steppe ghost. In her eye, her captor's people were all beautiful in a sense, though there was an uncanny sense of disconnect...as if she were looking upon a man that wasn't entirely human, or at least, not the same way as she. The shape of his ribs beneath his bared chest were segmented, rather than smooth, and while his developed musculature had its own mouth-watering quality, his belly seemed...almost sunk. A simple cloth garb was wrapped around his waist, doing little to obscure the long, low-slung shape of his masculinity.
Inspired as she was, she couldn't help but wonder at taking one to bed.
After spilling blood, Askara would be as a rosy flame, her desire desperate to be quenched.
