Elizzibiana/History/Glimpse Soul
A glimpse into a soul
She stands outside her home on the low mountain, staring past the s’lais that are trying to get her attention, staring at the paths that twist and turn like her life. “For so long this mountain was as quiet as my heart,” she murmurs, “then these paths became a turmoil of blood and war, lives taken and lives given. A baby screamer who came to play one day on my doorstop, and then just as quickly disappeared.”
Her mind turns to happier times, the day she found true love in her sraan, the love of her mother, the closeness of her ru’at, the blissfulness of youth. Her stare ices over as she remembers the darker days of being banned from her sraan for loving a forbidden one, finding her father's grave far from the village, making her way through the jungles to a new city, finding out many years later of the massacre of her family and love.
“Why?” she screams at the mountain, its passiveness shattered but it does not answer back “why have you forsaken me? What have I done or not done to deserve such a tormented existence as this? You gave me my love back albeit in a younger body, made me feel like a cradle robber but I never questioned it, I accepted it.” She yells to the wind but the wind does answer, whistling through the rock scree. She turns, listening, the s’lai having left her after the first sound, scared.
Dropping to her knees you at first think she has been attacked physically but the anguish in her eyes speaks otherwise, they stare back coldly, colder than most of her race. The lines deepen on her face, the years of seeing much death and angst etched boldly upon it as many of her friends have died or gone into a deep sleep, those remaining going their separate ways. The mountain has seen much, and more but it remains silent, biding its time as it has in the past.
“This is to be the way of it?” she questions calmly “there is no other way?” The wind whistles by seeming to respond “no other way” She stares at the way the path winds over the mountain then reaches into her shroud and pulls forth a lata, the sun glinting on the blade highlighting an etching of a serpent entwined about a banner that read “Loyalty above all” then slowly slices her right forearm then her left blooding the blade. “If this is to be the way then so be it, a name is a name while loyalty to ones kin and ancestors takes priority.”
Turning she slams the blade into the ground outside the doorstep then leaps to her feet “the boar and the cobra forsake but the viper always protects, the viper torments, the viper will always be there, even for the unnamed ones” she whispers to the wind. She locks the door tightly after reaching inside and removing a ring from the alter inside the door “till I return, maybe a visit to the rock will clear my mind.” Then wandering the path around the mountain, her feet knowing the way even in the darkest of stormy nights even as she inspects a heavy ring she slips on, the lanahh’zhranaarti.
Disappearing from sight you smell a trace of long dead ashes on the wind that carries the murmur “yes, the unnamed ones return”