Griefstorm

Is he running?! Holy shit, that’s new. Okay, slow down, dumbass. Where is he going now? Aryat’s momentum betrays him — feet skidding into the dirt before he wrestles himself back into the slow, ragged rhythm demanded of dead gods. His coat sweeps the golden dust after him as if apologising for its owner’s behaviour.

They don’t know him anymore, that much is clear. And frankly, he doesn’t want to know them either.

Hey, he can always go back to the Antari chamber and blow himself up again. Nah, was annoying the first time. Reconstituting in this new body feels like grinding salt rocks with a broken millstone. Not pleasant. And if he can’t even obliterate himself properly, he might as well enjoy this laboured self-expression—gifted to him by whom? Fuck knows.

No more thread-space. No previous binding attachments he can understand. What he lives now is their voices, which he doesn’t hear. He feels them like unfinished wood splintering against the insides of his veins. Does he even have those? He doesn’t care.

Edrin warned him. Aryat’s feel of the Ryati is outdated. They aren’t even shaped like his people. They were fierce, gorgeous, and obedient. What the fuck are these idiots?

“Goddamn ingrates. Don’t know what’s good for them.” He spills his venom out, just talking shit to no one in particular. “Rot, then. Rot in the mediocrity you worship. Rats.”

Aryat scrapes the air into his lungs and spits it back out, spicing the dirt with bitterness.

His temple from lifetimes ago finally graces his sight. No roof on it anymore. Only one floor left. But its geometries are intact. It’ll recognise him.

Dust jumps up nervously around his boots, in broken wisps, as if the ground itself thinks he is contagious. A lizard scurries away from its favourite sunspot; bitch, please, he wasn’t even near it. A hawk overhead decides against hunting here and banks hard towards the mountains.

A river once coiled around this place, all silk and honey, swelling readily at his mere approach. Gone now, dried as bone, a lover’s grave. No more herbs trembling on its shores to perfume his feet. No more predators curling up under his touch. The wind sounds alien with Aryat’s name excised from its song. It no longer carries his whisper across this land - his land.

This temple was built for one purpose: to drink Aryat’s will, to couple with him, to give itself up without question. Empty or not, its angles still wear Varahis’ impeccable math; its stones gleam seductively. It was never granted the capacity to refuse him.

He ascends to the ruins. Everything that matters is in place. The anchor stone stands undisturbed. No resonance forks to activate this contraption, but he’ll find a way.

With his boots, he bares the shy floor under the sand, seeking the markers to make the pillars sing and fold the frequencies onto the anchor. He can’t recall the type of stone needed for this. Fuck. Try whatever’s around. That big grey one practically volunteers. Aryat picks it up and returns to a marker, assaulting it; maybe a notch too forceful. Another one. Another. Nothing fucking happens. He tosses it outside with a growl.

Crouching at the anchor stone, he places his palm on it. Tell me what to do. What the fuck is he even doing here? He was never any good at this shit. It was all Varahis and his people. They knew how to work these things. Aryat caresses the anchor, suffocating his rage along the silicate lattices of his body, into the spaces between his breaths, behind his eyes. A memory slams through him—of how this place used to bathe him in devotion, how it elevated and filled him, how it bent to his mind even before he said a word.

Is this a feedback? The stone answers him, tactile, subtle, but definitely present. You remember me. Aryat presses his palm into it as if trying to melt the damn thing down. It shuts up. Bullshit. This is like smelling a feast after starving for a century, then only being afforded a single olive. He tries another hand, cupping the smoothness of the anchor deliberately and precisely, the way he once coaxed lust from flesh. It ignores him.

Aryat raises himself slow, real slow. He wipes his forearm across his mouth, removing the metallic tang of humiliation.

“Resistance is the flavour of entry,” he drones as he walks towards a pillar. His gait is too heavy for the complaining limestone beneath him.

Fuck the markers; pillars are what needs to make noise. He looks down at his fist. It’ll do. The polished and arrogant granite cracks under his blow. Shit. Of course you fucking would. He swings again—harder. Another crack. Wider this time, like it’s smiling at him.

“Fucking! Remember! Me!” He booms.

“Used to be a good little whore.”

Strike.

“Recognise me!”

Strike harder.

“Make me king again!”

Swing to the left.

“Begged me to own you once. C’mon.”

Hit.

“Beg now.”

The pillar falls from his frenzy, as if saying, ‘Better fall than watch this loud child tear himself apart.’ He has no concept of what his body is doing now. The world blurs into jagged pictures. Another pillar buckles under the weight of his chaos. Another cracks from the floor to its stripped top. Another fallen fragment. He hurls it towards the orphaned entrance, where the cedar doors hung once. He used to come through those doors, escorted, served, perfect. Looking at his hands, he is disappointed they are intact. This fucking body is weird. It doesn’t bleed. Not even the decency to fracture.

Now the temple wouldn’t work, even if Varahis himself resurrected to dote on his former master. Aryat lowers against a surviving pillar, but it moans and falls away from his tectonic back. Damn… wasn’t even trying to scare that one.

He hugs his knees and closes his eyes like a man who’s had enough of himself.

“I used to be light… “ His voice cracks.

It cracks because the phrase was old. Because he was old, and because rage no longer stitched him together the way it once did.

“You decided to re-arrange its geometries then? Although … none of this looks like a particularly deliberate choice.”

Great. He can’t even tell when someone’s coming his way. But it’s only Edrin, and Aryat stays put.

“I remember how elated Varahis was when he finished designing this place,” Edrin sits his lanky body next to Aryat. “It served you well.”

His armour isn’t forged. It’s grown—segmented, like something bred to remember war. Ant logic. Elongated spikes and strange edges encumber its silhouette. An’nta glyphs etched on a forearm plate are made visible by the light brown clay clinging in their groves.

“That armour. Looks useless,” Aryat barks at him, the words scraping out before he can think. Too quick, too harsh.

Edrin shifts his weight to crouch in front of him, effortless, clearly in full control of the armour Aryat just pissed on.

“I did not make them deaf and blind to your presence,” he says, measured but cutting. “And I did not make you this way.”

Aryat snarls something low in his throat, because Edrin isn’t even wrong. Fuck him for it.

“Who the hell did then?”

“I do not know.”

Aryat falls on his back with a metallic exhale. Staring at the sky, he clicks his tongue at its blue nonchalantness.

“So, this damn place won’t work now?” Rhetoric, and he hates it immediately.

“No, it will not.”

Edrin takes his helmet off. Aryat hadn’t seen his face since before Vel Akhtun. He looks older, thinner, his skin is insect-like somehow. What the fuck did he do to himself? Even so, it’s good to see him around.

“What am I doing here again?” Aryat muses, his voice rolling from behind his vocal cords with a slight lag. “Who wanted me back this badly? Enough to put me into this play with no script and no audience? Who is such a clever and secretive motherfucker, huh?”

“I do not know why you are back, or why you were brought back, and by whom, Aryat.” Edrin rises, focused on the horizon. “But it does not look like it was for you to continue weaving your old threads.”

Edrin replaces his helmet with a well-oiled gesture. Aryat looks up at him, and squinting against the sun, he smirks.

“Your vigorous interior re-decorating attracted company,” Edrin says, not returning his glance, and swivels to scan the distances around the ruins. “Three groups. Approaching at a decent speed.”

Aryat sighs. Fuck’em too. Edrin gazes down at him. Still looking for his command? Nah. Just evaluating his state.

“I’ve nowhere to go. Let them come. I’ll show them some more of—what you called it?—re-decorating,” he chuckles. His amusement is a dry, contorted thing. It sprays out like a bunch of sand from an artery.

“If you want a chance to figure out why you are back, let me take you to the Zussa,” Edrin picks up his spear and turns his spiky armoured face in Aryat’s direction, but he is still refusing to get up.

“I don’t need your help.”

Edrin makes a series of clicks and hisses, foreign and confident.

“Okay,” he says over the shoulder on his way out.

“Yeah, walk away.”

Aryat returns on his back and closes his eyes. He waits for the people to approach the carcass of the temple. Maybe to ignore them. Maybe to hurt them. Maybe to invite them to hurt him. He doesn’t know yet. Nobody approaches, even when they already should’ve been on top of him. He listens to the air, to the ground, to the stones. The place is still silent, frigid to his demands for information.

Raising his mineral mass, he looks past the battered pillars and walls, their suffering fragments scattered down the hill. The horizon is clean, and it disappoints him. Reality is being written without him, and Edrin’s protective attitude feels like a thorn in his sternum. He didn’t fucking ask to be saved.