H U Y A N A
the world is drowning

On his tongue, her name is dark and sinister, unfurling nefarious wings into the stark winter air. It sends cold fingers down her spine, and those oceanic eyes flick toward him once more, their gaze unwavering, as steadfast as death. An ear twists backward, and she watches him from beneath black eyelashes, her breath pale and tangible. Why do you follow me? Something happens in her face, and her lips skim backward, the exhalations now swift and sprawling. "It is you that follows me," she says, little more than a sigh, a lifetime passing before her luminous eyes. She does not wish to relive it; let the loss be for the losers and let those strong enough to carry on do so. I will not break, when countless before me have done so. How many lives have been taken from her, how many homes claimed from underneath her feet - how many times has she been promised peace, when only that grim reaper heeds the call. Her head tilts, swaths of inky mane shifting scrupulously, aroused by icy winds. She must be as naive as a filly to believe every passing messiah who barks and haws and preaches harmony. The rainchild knows what they truly want, what they crave deep within the blackened and charred recesses of their hearts; ambition, greed, the overwhelming desire for more and more. They do not want amity, or unity, they long for greatness, for legend. They want their names to be cast between the stars, wrought as sparkling stones for all the world to see. And so the girl, so drunk with the newness of the world she has come into and so enamoured of the idea of peace, believes every passing priest, clings to every word like milk from a mother's tit.

Did she ever have a mother?

His eyes are eternity, they are death and they are life. Did he ever have a mother to nurture him, to coddle him? When she was born, she had the arms of a storm to cherish her, its raindrops to nurse from, and when she was a child, she had the sea to comfort her when her skin became bruised with the rigors of youth, the brine of her womb to heal her wounds, her wisdom to soothe her worries. Where is she now, the sea? The Edge, the closest thing she had to a home, had been wrenched from her, and an ache in her breast attests to her sorrows. This icy wasteland is a far cry from that great ocean, but it bears certain kinship to her. It reminds her so much of Mauja, Frost King, and she wonders where he dwells, if he is flourishing in this winter of the heart. Where is brave Aurelius, that golden imp, or gentle Lena, charity and darling embodied. Blue flowers, long wilted, are still entwined in her swarthy mane. They were her friends, or as close as she would ever have in this damned land, and as far as she knows, they have sunk into the snow, waiting for a spring that will never come.

"Deimos," she whispers, her gentle voice breaking the frigid silence between them, his name foreign on her tongue. River blue eyes still hold his gaze firmly, relentless as summer showers. "They say death is the ultimate reprieve." She remembers being a scholar once, in what seemed another life; it had been a forest, dark and lovely and deep, but far from the sea and charred by past follies. Huyana pauses for a long time, lion's tail flicking across her flanks and sending snowflakes eddying around her. It almost seems as if she has gone mute altogether, but she draws a breath. "Is it true?" I would like to drown.