Finishing Quarantine Communications has left me in the mood for Djoseras/Zultanekh so could I see a snippet from threnody?
Thank you for the ask! Regret to say Threnody is going to be a sad, sad time, though I guess the title was a giveaway 😖 It's an AU piece where Zultanekh got to recover and bury Djoseras after the events of TDK. Very, very melancholy:
Djoseras's tomb was a small and sombre place. Too small, Zultanekh thought, for the life the kynazh had lived. Too minimal. Too many things, few of them desirable, but if Zultanekh had had his way Djoseras would not have died at all and not even princes could have everything they wanted. They entered the palace and made their way to the sepulchral hall. Nothing had changed since the last time he'd been here. No sarcophagus, just a noctilith slab. Zultanekh knew to expect nothing else, for he'd learned the palace inside and out during his time with the kynazh. But as he laid Djoseras down he felt it to be a pity, all the same: no royal warden would ever guard those doors, never legions asleep to protect and honour the kynazh, no crypteks, canopteks, not even a scarab to maintain the structure after they were gone. No doubt the kynazh would have advised him, had he still lived, that he could not logically miss what had never been there. In the three hundred years prior to Djoseras's death he had only ever brought his Immortal guards to this place, and they'd never slept nor awakened in the palace, merely stood in the unending desert until it was their time to die. This recollection did nothing to amend Zultanekh's sentimentality. His great shoulders heaved, as if to take a deep breath - then he uncovered the kynazh, and looked upon him awhile.
It won't be a long piece, but hopefully it will be cathartic. I always felt sad about the fact that Djoseras spent so much effort to relocate his tomb complex - exiling himself to a desert very like Sedh, resigning himself from all of Antikef's affairs, essentially waiting to die alongside his brother - and yet was never able to be buried in it. I thought exploring that moment might be important.
