A woman came into the temple, saying that she was her sister, and after some tears, she fell into her arms. They embraced, the sobs echoing against stone, while he watched with a heart boiling with fury and an undertow of suspicion against love.
"What a flame love is, casstte," he murmured that night while stroking her hair as she lay sleeping on his chest; "It slowly burns away the lies."
He had followed the sister in the early hours, catching her whispering into a phone behind a crumbling pillar--cold, calculating words belying her--a bounty hunter paid to bind away his love. He was consumed with rage. He followed her onto the sugarcane fields, whose tops wept and swayed like mourners. With a sickle, he cut down her legs; the blade went deep through her flesh, and as she screamed, blood soaked the soil beneath her. She crawled, crying out, with dirt grasped in her hands. He slapped the sickle through her spine, silencing her cries with a sickly squelching sound. He cut her body into pieces, chopping the face into the visage of a demon, eyes wide open in terror, blood running down the grooves. "You betrayed her," he growled, as limbs fell lifeless like harvesting chaff. The heavy fog of death filled the air. "She is my casstte, my luck-star- I will wipe any stars off the heavens for me!"
Back to the temple, he hurled her head down at her feet, hair matted with blood. "She was not your blood, meri casstte," he spoke gently, pain soaking into his words, as he trembled. "She was your noose."
She slumped to him, bloody tears falling against the kurta where her fingernails dug in. "I believed her."
"And I saved you..." he whispered, kissing her tears, mouth stained red. "No one will sting you while I live, meri casstte." From far up in the hills, a faint shout was carried by the wind-more were coming.
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