Two Eyes Cenote just give me what's mine.

single replies welcome, just tucking this into qiao's threadlog as i catch up from my vacation <3 set for tonight (9/1/2024)

waning crescent. nearly time. tomorrow the sky would close in on the moon and swallow it in its blackness. a rebirth, the earth's cycling of a new age born from the ashes of the freshly deceased. qiao marked the moon's progress across a constellation of ancient stars with rheumy eyes and wondered how many lights had snuffed out in her lifetime.

the effigies and artefacts were prepared. eset recovered. there would be little use for her much longer. time, in all its fluidity, had a way of drawing doors shut, and qiao could feel these halls shrink like the constricting belly of a colubrid digesting its last meal.

no, it would not be much longer.

she placed the owl pellet to dry on the back of a rough stone. alongside it sat the three quills collected before she'd met lestan, a hawk's wizened limb with its talons curled a death-clutch, and a soft bundle of bluestem weaved with chicory root. 

in the corner of the room, the wolf-skull glowered. qiao's eye was drawn to him -- her luckless companion through countless roads, raids, wars, and respites. so many journeys across so many lifetimes. to her, the great framing of his eye sockets appeared incredibly sad.

ha ha, gone soft, have we? the crone spoke to the skull's lingering spirit, but for once the prattle of his voice was disapprovingly silent. there was a bitterness to that space between them that seemed delightfully ironic -- had his soul finally grown a heart?

she turned back to the effigies and spat three times, drawing a halo around the stone with her claw. three claw marks were dragged into the dry earth from the hawk's talons towards the east.

when qiao was done, she slipped on the greenbrier torc that holstered the wolf's skull to her neck. the wind rattled overhead, producing a sigh that rifled her fur and whistled between the lobes of the skull's high arches.

it was nearly time to wake the children.