Game of dice

The outcast of carrion rises, curing a smile with the salt of his words, ‘You would risk everything?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you are certain that you would leave the terms of your defeat to me?’

‘I am certain.’

A laugh, gaseous and fetid, seeps through the tenure of agreement, ‘Then you are a fool, for only a fool is certain of anything.’

She turns an arc, stirring dust into the desert, ‘Do you seek to mock me now?’

‘You would speak of mocking, to me?’ The Tick. Tick. Tick. Of the clock, falls silent with his question.

She does not answer.

‘Then perhaps this is just another shattered grail to you?’ Familiar, cool cotton rain falls, temperate. A blind drawn backwards across the sun, ‘So many have narrated my form around that sniveling companion.’

Still she does not answer.

Teeth snap at the air, blood on black, ‘Tell me at least why you would chose dice as mechanism for this game? Why not a game of skill where the odds can be woven closer around your skills?’

She finally lifts her head, her eyes raw, ‘It seems that chance is the only truth left now.’

‘Then we are done with talking, make your choice.’

‘It is for you to choose,’ she waits even then, for another way.

But there is none. The words ooze suit from the fat of his pale lips, ‘I choose, Even.’

‘Then,’ she sighs, ‘Odd is mine.’

The die are cast.

Thrown.

6 in 12.

A shift.

Too small to catch.

Missed between thumb and finger.

Both fall.

Scattered and discovered.

Made again with the ragged dots of bone.

The numbers.

The fates.

Skip.

Slow.

Settle.

EVEN.

He tilts his head, flicking his tongue around the maggots of her flesh, his blood drawn raptor by the sweet of it, ‘I win!’

‘So it is,’ she whispers. But it is her unspoken words that writhe poison in the pastures of his bloated victory.

He recoils, ‘What is this flavour, this scent of grey treachery in your loss?’

But she is already breaking.

Wing on stone. She breaks. Wing on stone. She is lost.

Dying, again.

Beginning, again.

A new earth. She forgets again. That there was once a winner. In this game of dice.