Today marked her third opponent in this place of sand and wind and heat and sun. She had been here for time unmemorable it seemed, and yet it only spanned the lengths of a few measly months. It held appeal, it held nothing. She wanted opponents to litter the bright, gold and red sands of her homeland as she cut them down. She wanted to be left alone. She wanted... nothing. She didn’t know what she wanted. How sad a state to dwell within when one could no longer gauge the true desire of their heart and mind. Everything had gone so horribly downhill after he had left her, on that fateful early Fall morning, yet she refused to play the coward and blame everything on him. She did not put the burden on the shoulders of an absent man and shrug all responsibility. She merely knew. He played his part, she played hers. Life was a game and they had played their roles and their pieces of the board had moved aside like all pieces eventually did.
Wind swept across the vast stretches of her arena, scoring her with the heat it brought from the scorched sands and the drying sun. She felt cool beneath her layered robes, safe from the sun she loved so much, a sun that didn’t exist in his world. Only ice and darkness existed in his world.
Acyutani raised one scarred and battle beaten hand to her face, running her fingers across the deep red material that covered her features from the bridge of her nose and down. Nothing of her was ever seen in this place. Her head hooded, her face covered. Only her eyes could give her away, but they stayed as black as the obsidian rock on which she sat, its large body overturned and lying flat upon the sand. Its many brothers lay behind her, like gnarled fingers protruding from the ground in some grotesque attempt at freedom. They extended into sharp points towards the sky, taller than any man. Upon a central spire, in the midst of so many others, lay two names; Ebivoulya Shinak and Elijah Morendale, her two opponents that fought well against her. She’d learned from each of them. Not as much as he taught her, but enough, more than enough. When her next opponent arrived—Trago—so too would his name be carved upon the surface of that rock as if by an unseen hand.
She wanted that rock filled, more than anything though; she wanted one name in particular on that rock.
Lowering her hand from her face, Acyutani looked out over the vast sands of Ranajira, one of her two fighting arenas that the Pagoda had gifted her with. All around her lay an innumerable amount of sand, shifting with the wind and sliding down the walls of this Valley of the Dead. Most only looked upon the grains and saw beige, a boring and light colour brown. But she could see the gold and the red and the orange, creating a dance of colour and shadow. The shadows in this place did not give one any kind of refuge though, they may shield a person’s skin from the sun, but should one be so unlucky they may find their shadow inhabited by more than just their own person. Arta lurked in this landscape, not even she knew where they hid their disgusting and rotting forms. In this place, unlike so many others in Althanas, the sun did not give life but take it away. Still, it could be so beautiful and Acyutani would rather have this sun and this desert over the deep forests of Concordia any day. She felt at ease here, but in the deep and lush forests found on Corone, unease trickled into her mind.
Tipping her head back, Acyutani closed her eyes and waited as the heat of the sun melted into the deep red and purple robes covering her body. All she could do now was wait and hope this new opponent offered some kind of entertainment for her. Some break from the mundane and the every day.
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