Post by Seek on Sept 13, 2015 7:56:21 GMT 10
Title: Brightly-Burning
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: Taking Flight, (#112)
Summary: Asiyah wants to know what's wrong. Zahir doesn't have the words for it.
Notes: Tentatively set in this long Bazhir AU I'm still working on. Might be an AU of an AU, even. AU-ception, anyone?
-
He burns.
At first, Zahir ibn Alhaz considers that it might be a punishment for his presumption, this fire in his blood. His skin feels too dry; paper-thin, far too fragile to contain the radiant glory of the sun that flames within him, that boils his blood in his veins, that scorches muscle and chars his bone and fills his head and nostrils with the sharp stink of smoke.
Bazhir do not go to the Black City, not unless they wish to die.
Perhaps this, then, is death; except the Black God himself has spurned him. Not a comforting thought--their gods, not yours, the voice whispers, like starfire, like a clarion--and he slips in and out of a waking dream
"Zahir, come back to me," Asiyah whispers; the cool touch of a water-soaked rag against his forehead but still he burns and he doesn't think he'll ever stop burning and
He rides, again, to the Black City; stones gleaming in the sunlight, seeming to swallow the light. His heart beats too fast, like the fluttering wings of a northern hummingbird. Every fibre of his being wants him to admit defeat, to seek solace in servitude to the King in the North, or to simply bow his head and accept the new headman of the Sleeping Lion. Every story he's ever heard, every warning he has been given tells him that the Black City is a place of death and no sane Bazhir goes there.
Except that he can see Baqir's smile, reflected in a dozen glossy stones.
He must go. He cannot explain the compulsion. He loops the reins about Asima's saddlehorn. He will not teter her here to die. "Go," he tells her. His horse looks at him placidly and simply remains.
There's no help for it.
He squares his shoulders--stiffly, despite his fear--and walks into the depths of the beckoning city.
-
There are no demons here, the Northern King says, sharply. All the demons are dead; the legends claim the Bazhir will be free of the call of the Black City on the day the Brightly-Burning One and the Night One ride to do battle with the demons. The day has come and gone; they have been freed not by their gods but by northerners but--
But some youth still feel the call of the City. Are still drawn by it.
Your gods, not ours. Never ours.
-
The Black City sleeps and dreams.
-
"Zahir."
So much in a single word; a plea, a prayer. He struggles to acknowledge her, with a body gone unresponsive and sluggish, but if his finger twitches, if his tongue utters the word--Mother--it is gone, engulfed, devoured by flame.
-
He strides through the deserted city, hand drifting towards the hilt of the sword hanging by his side. On his other hip, he wears the lion-bone dagger. He should not bear it, part of Zahir thinks. It is not right for him to take the weapon with him into disgrace, as if Alhaz's memory will bear further shame.
He has brought enough onto it.
He prowls through room after room, chamber after chamber, and sees no sign of life. Out of the corner of his eye--much like the shimmer of heat over the distant desert sands, he sees Baqir, always grinning, always distant. He is being led, unerringly, Zahir realises, and he smiles grimly.
He loosens his sword in its sheath. Ordinary steel cannot do very much against demons, he knows, and he has no Gift. But he is not afraid to die; has not been, in years. Part of him, he thinks, has died a long time ago, as he stacked the rocks that formed his father's cairn, as he knelt alone in vigil and pulled out the Tortallan-fletched arrows that had slain his father, as was his right as eldest.
The demons are not dead. One, at least, still lives.
-
Baqir--or the demon--leads him to a small antechamber behind what must be a throne room with a grand dais. He recognises the clacking earring now, realises with a cold frisson of not-quite-fear that it is the same stone as that of the Black City.
"What are you?" he demands.
Baqir simply looks at him. The darkness spreads across his eyes, engulfing iris and the whites of his eyes, turning them pitch-black.
At last, he says, "I am the one who remains, at the end of all things."
Laughter, in the dark. Night falls.
-
The demon holds out the vase to him. "Choose," he says, simply.
Zahir would draw his sword, but his arm locks by his side and he cannot seem to move it. With an effort of will, he says, thickly, "I don't yield to demons."
He cannot quite take his eyes off the vase; it is polished bronze, worked with stylised depictions of an eagle and flames and the sun. For no reason, he recalls a child's tale, of a proud eagle brought down with an arrow fletched by its own feathers.
"It is not a choice for you," the demon says. "The choice is for the Bazhir."
Zahir narrows his eyes. "And?" Will not admit that the demon cannot find a better hook, better chains with which to bind him and to reel him in. He has watched the demise of the Bazhir; is watching it now, is living it. His people--for all they hate the northern tribes, he is as much Barzunni as he is Bazhir, and the Bazhir cannot survive alone, he knows that now, they have been forged together for good or for ill (yet another betrayal)--are dying, by arrow, by sword, and this cruelest wound of all: leaving the desert to seek better lives in Tortall, raising their swords beneath the Northern King's banner, returning more Northmen than desertman.
This is the slow death of the spirit, the slow death of the Bazhir, something in him clenches, will do anything to avoid that vision the Chamber sent him, of an empty tent, an old man alone, the last fire cooling to embers then ashes scattered before the desert wind.
"Will you save them?" the demon asks.
"I will."
"Will you fight for them?"
"I will," he snaps.
"Will you bleed for them?"
"I will," he replies. He doesn't notice the swift knife-cut until the skin of his swordarm tears from wrist to elbow, until he is bleeding in a cruel parody of the ritual of the Voice.
The black stones drink the blood--how much can a man lose? he wonders--and the demon beckons him forward, roughly presses his wounded arm against the jar, tugging at it so he smears the engraved bronze with his blood.
He feels the onrush of heat; the brief clarion of an eagle's cry, and a whisper of wings, and then he is devoured, drowning in a sea of fire.
-
He is dressed in the fashion of his father's fathers; burnoose, loose thobe, trousers beneath, and sleeveless wool vest. Instead of boots, he wears hide sandals, made in the traditional style. The lion-bone dagger hangs at his belt. There is no sign of his sword.
There is no one else; he does not recognise this desert, the sands of black glass, and he forges on as best as he can.
And then he sees it: the eagle, brightly-burning, its wings of smoke and fire, chained to a jutting, ombre rock.
And the eagle sees him.
-
He knows what he must do. He does not know how the knowledge enters his mind, unprompted. There are no stories for this; no wisdom-tales to guide him. And yet he remembers, somehow. He remembers the desert, the black glass, the rock, and the eagle, as though some deeply-buried part of him remembers what the tribesmen have long forgotten.
He places his hand on the rock and draws, with his other hand, the lion-bone knife. It is clumsy in his heart-hand. It does not matter.
The knife is sharp and it takes barely a touch to part skin. He makes the same cut, again. Blood drips onto the rock.
The chains shatter; the eagle flares up with a triumphal cry.
And then he is burning.
-
He is the eagle. The eagle is him.
They burn, incandescent, like a star, like a sun. They soar through chapters of the history of the Bazhir; back when one people left the lands of the old empire (Carthak, Zahir thinks, but the eagle, the djinn does not know of these petty geographical boundaries, these pointless labels), before the divide into Barzunni and Bazhir, before the days when the Bazhir divide into tribes wandering the desert, back when they still had gods.
He has always thought their gods nameless because of the amnesia of conquest; now he understands. Man cannot grasp the divine, cannot hope to comprehend but a single fragment of the inferno, of the whirlwind that rages through his being and consciousness and breaks him and remakes him again, scorching him pure in a crucible.
For a single, shining instant, he hangs, suspended, disembodied, Zahir and not-Zahir at the same time, his fragile grasp on his own being eroding.
He looks down and he sees all of it: the immensity of history, the entirety of the djinn, the nameless god that has engulfed him in its wings.
He watches the Ysandir break his people and bind them, chaining their gods, rendering them helpless, casting them into slumber.
Until now.
He cannot translate the cry of the eagle; it is a call to arms, a call of freedom, a call beyond the restrictions of words and human thought and language.
He is falling.
Wings of fire and air and smoke rip free of his shoulderblades.
He is soaring, tumbling in flight.
-
His lips are cracked, drying, bleeding.
"Is he any better?"
"No."
Another voice; this is the tribe's shaman. Dryly, "It is what we are. Mortal. It is difficult to contain the divine, even one so diminished as our gods. It will kill him, you understand. It is only a matter of time. For now, his body is fighting it."
"What can we do, then?"
"Wait," the shaman says. "Wait, and hope."
-
"You're killing me," he cries, to the eagle wound tightly within him, bound to flesh and blood and bone.
The eagle doesn't understand mortality, doesn't understand fragility and limitations.
So he makes it.
-
He burns.
Perhaps he will always burn; perhaps a part of him will always lie chained to that jutting rock in the desert of black glass, burning. He opens his eyes. The worst of it has passed. He does not recognise where he is, for a few long moments. And then he realises he is in the tents of the Sleeping Lion.
"Zahir!"
He lets his mother pull him into a tight hug, holds her, because he never expected to come back, because he has wrestled with a god and he has emerged victorious.
"You frightened me," Asiyah says.
"I know," he replies. "I am sorry." He means it. He traces the long scar on his swordarm, tinted a fiery orange, and frowns. It is not a dream, then. (Barzunni colours.)
Part of him wishes it was.
She touches the orange thread she tied at his wrist a lifetime ago, and lets go. "You're burning," she says, with a frown.
"I know," he repeats.
He is burning. He always will.
(Their hatreds are your hatreds.)
He has flown with the eagle-djinn-god, has seen the past and the present and--dimly--the shape of the future. He knows, now, what must be done.
Maybe once we'd have seen it during Smackdown!