I will conquer.
At what moment in time she comes to the inevitable, grisly conviction there was to be no way to retreat, to elude the ghoulish, epitome of oblivion, of rapacious
greed, something so exceedingly barbaric and
yet so very cunning, she is of little confidence. But enshrined afterwards inside her mind is
this—whichever way she flees, for however long, it is there, whether the
right or the left or in front or behind, it is
playing with her, a calamitous game of cat and mouse where she is the
mouse; and though horror accelerates her frantically thundering heart and whets her senses, she cannot hear where the primordial beast was. Whatever stroke of luck (or had it
intended for her to know it was coming, had found the tumult of the chase, the drama
exciting, rousing its hunger) had allowed her to hear its arrival had long since dimmed, several times she believes she has been freed from the creature she arrives mere feet from its forelimbs, nearly dancing into its clutches and; indeed, rather inviting her (‘
come into my lair, rest,’ said the spider to the
fly). Froth lathered her mouth and truly, she was
exhausted, wearying and waxing like the moon before the sun, how
tempting then it was to simply give in, to let it be over and done, to lay down at its feet and be devoured, perhaps this had been her destiny from the second she fled Arazar. Who was she, fleet-footed and tenacious, to avoid death?
So it is, then, she when she veers to a standstill before the monster once more, unable to fixate on the hunter who has very nearly caught its quarry, she considers her options and finds them altogether void.
How absurd a death, how
humiliating, to have had mother and Azarel care and feed and clothe her in affection for so long (even if Azarel hated her on the day she
spat at him in her fury, her indignation—) only to slump and bow at the grotesque face of this
thing, this thing that seemed better to live in nightmares and childish imaginations than reality and verity.
I’m sorry, she beseeches her mother’s memory,
I’m sorry, I was never as strong as (Destry; Azarel)—and then from the capacious shrub erupts a darkness blacker than the one encompassing her, a shape so foreign and yet so
achingly familiar she stands and gapes. The lethargy whirling about her deepens before spiraling away with torturous clarity.
“Dezba?” She croaks with a soaring, capering hope, careless of the danger
“Dezba it’s me—” and then it descends, craters into a abyss. A jaguar it may be, though it is of the wrong odor, and as enormous as she; it would stand up to her face to face on all fours, and almost as immediately as she reaches this conclusion she comprehends now is when she ought to run, concede the beasts their bloodshed and
leave, nevertheless this cat has awakened in her a kind of bravery she did not feel she had, for though the rhythm of her blood hammers still she cannot see fit to yield them to the jaws of the very thing she had tried so vehemently to liberate herself from.
What a unreasonable sentiment, love was, because the cool, rational half of her head wails this jaguar was also a predator, it wasn’t Dezba, it wouldn’t withhold from consuming her because she cared whether or not it died, but she cannot;
will not leave its side. Grimly, Cahira cavorts about the monster, defying, aiming (threatening) with a sweep of her rapier towards its side to pierce, to lunge it into its flesh, to rip and tear and maim. Always seeking for her hindquarters to be between it and its front, those teeth, those
wretched teeth.
“I won’t leave you here,” she declares, so vehemently it must be truth (as if the jaguar can understand her; then she thinks, perhaps it can), and then twice, thrice.
“I won’t.”
@
Kratos
Rainforest Cliffs
