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been training vipers to come for you

The soulless Xelayan girlthing squirms underneath Teleya’s touch, and she isn’t even pressing down that hard. How silly.

“You could overpower these guards within seconds, Solana Kitan,” Teleya says; she slithers away to pace on repeat, back and forth and back and forth, as the guards buckle tungsten cuffs around her thin wrists. “Why have you not?”

“I still don’t understand what I’m doing here,” Solana chokes, tears bubbling at the lines of her eyes. She’s not as strong as her sister. “This has to be some sort of mistake.”

“There is no mistake,” Teleya says, bellowing out her laughter, her mockery permeating the room. One of the guards makes a noise that sounds terribly like a giggle. “Your sister will come for you. The others will come for her. Or she will bring the others with them. I am not sure why this confuses you.”

“I just,” she says. “I don’t want to die. Not while I’m still even a little at odds with my sister.”

Teleya’s eyes roll, an intentionally audible sigh that draws out long into a hiss. “How touching. I fail to sympathize. As I was unable to say goodbye to my own sibling before his death, I should kill you before your sister arrives. However, it seems as if Avis has other plans, and I cannot question that.”

“So you’re not going to kill me?”

Teleya smiles. “You are nothing like her. I am unsurprised that your sister abandoned you.”

“Wh—what?”

“You are Xelayan. I know of your kind. You have great strength, but it is tainted by your pride. Very daring of you, to consider yourself superior to others when you are simply animals in the eyes of Avis. And the truth…. you are such a pitiful creature that, even when faced with imminent death, you do not fight back.”

Solana’s eyelids give heavy, drying blinks, blotting tears into nothingness over lush eyelashes. She’s trying to work up the bravery. She’s trying to talk herself into some pathetic something; Teleya can see it within her eyes, the flickering and the turning and the ticking of mind. She is beautiful despite her thingness. She is beautiful even when she struggles against her binds--manages to break them, actually, but her lack of combat skill gets her pinned against the ground within fragments of a second later. She slips out a sob again.

A guard extends a knife towards Teleya, but she refuses it. “Put her on her knees,” Teleya orders instead. Solana Kitan is beautiful for a soulless creature; Teleya prays that Avis will favor this sacrifice.