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[attr="id","sybariscol"]( WAR CHANT )
[ verse i. ]
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[ chorus i. ]
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off the hilt of a sword gleams the reflection of sunlight, hitting, in every spark, a new breath of life in a body broken beyond grief. in the folds of dawn, there is the crack of heat and flying embers, spinning, panicked, away from battle. evander is, in these quiet moments, human melody— his gaze hardened snakeskin, his grip brutal, his teeth bared; song of the predator, dancer to the hunt.
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he is serpent, and he is leaping, leaving his teacher’s blade finding absence in echo; his own has dug itself home in mentor’s padded neck before choir stopped singing— before his feet have kissed the ground.
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after, the man tells him he looks more like an artist than a warrior—
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“what does that mean?”
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the old man’s lips pressed taut. [break]“an artist has meaning in every moment—[break]the warrior knows it confined to a minute.”
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evander was nine years of age. he could not know, so young as he was, what the minute counted for.[break][break]
[ verse ii. ]
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he is surrounded by stillness; it makes his fingers weary. his mother stiffens to statue among lily ponds. his father’s eyes are marred by duty, and his robe stained in ink.
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to evander, his home is deafening.
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on these days he presses his own fist into his jaw, watching his tea grow cold, body emptying itself out over the floorboards stained in his blood.
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( but it is not his blood, not really; simply the remnants of his grief, dying among footfalls )
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he flinches as his cup shatters along the wall. nobody moves. his home remains untouched.
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he is falling to the floor, and there is nothing to catch him, as he lays there in his rumbling fury, experiencing baptism in a bath of his own tears, and feeling no more holy than the light masking his eyes.
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all he can remember of this moment is how pretty the tea looked, drenched in the rich walls of the sick house with the silent family, pooling back into the floor— how it looked just like his blood, only older, and less real.
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the dyed water wets his fingers too; he wonders:
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how has something so gentle been born from such cruel hands?
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[ chorus ii. ]
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to be born a wrecked child is to be born brutal; merciless and desperate, with crystals edging every finger into a knife—
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to be born a wrecked child is to be born endless. like the earth, hardening its skin to rock and soil, shifting around a core of fire.
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evander has two blades now, one for each damned hand, but the old man calls him
erlang: a warrior of heaven, his every movement flowing into each other, every sword he’s ever held imbued with his own blood.
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but it is in the dark of midnight, away from any expectations, that his master looks out over his home’s window, into the truthful eye of the waxing moon, and thinks of the broken boy who has claimed war as his second name. he takes out a piece of parchment; grips his quill with shaking hands; he begins a letter he will never send.
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see how i have massacred your son, he writes. [break]see how he finds peace in conquest.
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[ bridge. ]
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he is falling, from the very tightrope his mother hung for him, into a flood of white water; he feels it used to be a jungle, before it found the ocean tide and surrendered. the only life left in this place now is a snake with dyed skin, its back to him, and its tail loose in the river.
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in every scale he sees a king he never was ( or could be, but never fought a war for ), hurtling closer and closer to a dynasty succumbed to its own grave;
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all he smells now is smoke, is burning flesh, is dying witches, and the water is getting closer, and it looks more like a gaping mouth than a mother’s arms, and somewhere, a man is silenced—[break][break]
he wakes to wet skin and bleeding eyes. outside, there is pouring rain, colored in the fires cupped on candlesticks. evander is breathing and suffocating in the same breath; he rids himself of his bed, one hand pressing sorrow to his throat, and the other cupping flame.
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he walks to his balcony, edges the door open with his hip, and the water eats away the burn, and evander lets it give him color; lets it paint him white.
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there is too much truth in prophecy.
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[ chorus iii. ]
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he knows to find the wars he has hidden in every fold of muscle is just the same as searching for reverance in a blackened church. he has learned that so intimate is the perpetuation of hurt, or the aftermath of violence, that perhaps instead he is the chains which link them.
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he looks to the wall; he sees the browned splotches of a child who mispronounced every name he’d ever been given curving down to the floor.
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above the ruins, there are blades, beckoning for his hands. they beg for him, taking his eyes and distorting their color.
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evander understands now what he didn’t as a boy. that the world is back to disunity; to one minute at a time. one minute of everything at once. and anything before is nothing. everything after, nothing.
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nothing in comparison to that one minute.
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acolyte justification: evander blythe is a special operative in the field of BLANK for the coven SYBARIS. he is also the chief executive officer of BLYTHE ENTERPRISES, a defense company which develops and manufactures advanced weapons and military technologies.
[attr="class","appplayedby"]played by [attr="class","appooc"][attr="id","sybariscol"]SIRO
