The memory of Raziel's skeletal summerborne solitude paws like a pining dog at his feet; a dog that hopes for a bone - or a touch - or indeed anything at all.
For it is autumn and he has been waiting for the change to come.
Anticipation is a cumbersome business, one that impedes and distracts; a man might lose an entire fortnight to the affair if they are not careful. Raziel likes to think of himself as careful, if he does not know indeed that he is careful, but even the most meticulous of gentlemen can fall foul of apprehension if the very issue they laggardly await refuses to rear its ugly head.
You see, Raziel does not like distraction nor anticipation and most certainly he does not like change.
Raziel likes the gunmetal grey of his cellar floor, he likes when the day closes and the morning opens, he likes the click of his bedroom door sealing out the face of his aunt. These things he knows. They will not alter. They furnish the salve that soothes his hidden wounds.
But he is not a fool.
Raziel is well aware that adjustments and modifications to his small, fastidious world will always come knocking whether he likes it or not.
Still, awareness of universal truth does not seem to make the acceptance of it any easier.
Every year the expiration of summer promises to bring many revisions to Raziel's routine and none of them are pretty.
(The return of his family from their remodelled apartment in the city, the cold, the swell in the number of Saudagar's household staff, the worsening of Gahenna's mood, his birthday. They shrank and paled, nevertheless, under the weight of Raoul's deathday. The anniversary of his brother's slaughter somehow felt both sharper and duller with every passing year.)
And so here, under the pinched shadow of a palm tree, man and hound stand in a shared silence, holding vigil to a summer they wished would last forever.
♣
@august
06-17-2020, 05:49 PM - This post was last modified: 06-17-2020, 06:00 PM by Raziel
the great object of life is sensation - to feel that we exist, even though in pain
♠︎ ♕ ♠︎
Summer might be over in Solterra, but nobody told the weather.
It’s a dog-hot day, with clouds only a low haze at the rim of the horizon and the sun a baleful eye. Shadows flee beneath doors, and there is no wind in the city to stir the draped fabric in the markets or the sails of ships at harbor. The air is still and stale in his one-room rental, and it only takes him a few moments on the city streets to decide that he will have better luck finding a breeze outside the gates.
August might be a fool, but he is not so foolish to think it’s a good day to wander the desert. Instead he tracks due east, toward the oasis, though he’s never been there before and hopes he does not wind up lost. It does not seem like such a far-off possibility that he might never find civilization again, and a year from now someone might find a heap of bones (jackal-gnawed at the edges) and the slim ring from his nose in a neat pile at the bottom of a dune.
This is not a future he would choose for himself, so he takes care to pay attention to where he’s walking, and is rewarded an hour or so on when he sees a patch of green like an inkblot on the horizon. It does, in fact, look like a mirage, heat-shimmer and all, but resolves into a surprising Eden of greenery and water.
He goes to the water first, and drinks long until his throat and mind feel as cool and clear as the spring. Then he turns to a palm tree, and starts minutely at the two shadows beneath it, man and dog, both large and dark and rigid.
Maybe the heat has addled him, or maybe his curiosity just always outweighs his sense of late; either way, August hesitates only a moment before walking toward them, coat a golden sheen with sweat, posture easy and relaxed. “Is there room for another under there?” he asks, and answers his own question by stepping into the shade.
Only when his eyes adjust to it and he gets his first real sense of hound and stallion does he rethink his cavalier approach, but he summons a smile anyway. “What a marvel,” he says, but doesn’t specify the subject of his admiration.
Gahenna hears him first: someone's coming. Raziel is sharp but his hound has always been sharper and it is a truth he keenly begrudges and admires.
His mother always said that the desert is a liar and its co-conspirator is the wind. "It will eat you, if you let it. So don't fucking let it." Balsheva had been a blunt woman, stiff and callous, but she knew the land and even as a stilt-legged colt he had known to trust her judgement. She was right; sound is easily manipulated when it has nothing to barrel against but the sky.
It might whisper to the east only to whip violently back around south, too late for its casualty to catch on that it might be hiding men and rattlesnakes in its intricate disarray, and if he were to die today at the hand of an assassin concealed by the desert's untruth, he would not be the first. But Raziel does not think he is afraid to die.
He tries not to think about death too much. Tries.
Not today, though, as the pair watch the palomino stallion stretch into sight. Raziel blinks in the skin that shines like the gold under his own, noting every roll of muscle and each glint of light upon the ring fastened through his nose. He doesn't recognise him, but that comes as no surprise: Raziel Nazaret can count on one hand the number of times he has run into another soul this summer and with the recent change in sovereignty, he is under no illusion that his court knowledge has become desperately threadbare.
It makes him moderately uncomfortable: the presence of someone he does not know. Like an old veteran tied to old habits, he is not a creature made for capricious encounters; less so now, after many moons in the company of Gahenna alone. She has not risen from the shade, but her milk-white eyes are fastened tight to the man's throat. One wrong step. One quick end. But it is not bodily harm Raziel fears, rather clumsy disquiet at the thought of conversation.
He is thinking, quickly, of retreating into the sub-tropical thicket behind the oasis when the stranger's voice catches him. If he had not been raised in long meetings, dull lunches and political soiree's, Raziel might have audibly sighed. Can he even remember how to chat? Had he ever? A silence breaks between them as he fails to answer reflexively and perhaps a minute passes before he realises that he needn't have responded, for the gold man eases into the shade regardless. Gahenna still has not moved but Raziel knows her body to be coiled like a spring should it be required.
Raziel shifts loosely, edging minutely away from the other before offering a tight smile of his own. It feels almost arthritic.
"What is?"
As a boy, his grandfather had impressed upon both he and Raoul that manners and etiquette were what separated them from the common rabble of society. (He didn't mention the matter of inordinate wealth and influence, mind) They had been served the highest education by the top tutors in the country, and Raziel supposed much of his upbringing had stayed with him; perhaps all but the art of conversation. That had always been Raoul's forte; his twin had possessed a nose and flair for winding even the surliest of nobles around his fine fingers, leaving Raziel trailing behind in his disinterest. Raziel was blade-straight in his manner - a smarting disadvantage in a world where the manipulation of the written and spoken word meant everything. But he didn't mind, he'd always had Raoul to smile and charm and he had never envied him for it.
It was times like these that he wished his brother were still here.
the great object of life is sensation - to feel that we exist, even though in pain
♠︎ ♕ ♠︎
August doesn’t miss the minute adjustment of the other man away from him, nor the way that the beast (it seems insufficient, somehow, to think of it as a dog) watches not himself, exactly, but more the pulse-point below his jaw. It’s no more comfortable than the stare of Orestes’ lion, though he prefers the milky-white emptiness of the canine’s eyes to the heavy judgement in the cat’s. He might yet end up a pile of bones beneath sand today, and oh, he is growing weary of hostile eyes.
When the unicorn responds, then, he’s a little surprised. Quick as a swallow’s his gaze lifts to the stallion’s (in the shade, it is impossible to see the hint of gold there, along the waterline) and away again, out over the oasis that is as bold and pigmented as a sapphire set in a band of beaten copper.
“Oh, that age-old wonder - water in the desert. Paradise in purgatory. Is this the only one in the Mors?” He hates being nervous, but the last few weeks (murder at the outskirts of town, blood-baths hidden in the desert, wrathful lines traded with the new king) have turned him skittish and sure his luck is wearing thin. Encroaching on a big dark man and his big dark dog, both stoic as Sphinxes, does not seem like an improvement on the trend.
But other than his over-talking he hides it well, at least for now; when he looks back to the unicorn, though his smile has wilted to something faint and thoughtful. Something smells coppery, like blood, and he hasn’t yet realized why. “But now that I’m closer, you two, too, are rather imposing. And I don’t want to impose. Let me know if I should find another tree.”
If he tells the stranger that he sees severed heads in the dark and colours that don't exist in the light, would he still wish to share the breath of this shadow? There are ghosts out here: ghosts and open wombs ripped asunder by bodiless teeth. Doesn't he know?
Man and hound blink in unison; their thoughts straying closer to a place they do not like to go.
Ragged torchlight. Screams. Or was it laughter?
An end without a goodbye.
Raziel's gaze is violet metal on August's spine, counting the dapples like blessings until his eyes strike home on the scarab written like a flesh-borne promise. It isn't the first time he has seen a tattoo: one of his mother's favourite maids had been carpeted in them. She had thought they were novel, in the sort of way a bear finds a berry sweet, and what a curse it was to be brandished before the Solterran elite like a painting Balsheva had bought at auction.
Raziel had thought them crude. A stain on otherwise marketable skin. He'd certainly never bothered to ask her why they were there; that would have been asking too much of him. If he had, would he have felt pity for the story she had to tell? One of slave mongers and their affinity for branding their stock.
Unlikely. He was not a man known for kindness. In fact, he was not a man known for anything at all.
But this man, all sunlight and camel-cream -- you see, his mark catches Raziel's attention. It means something, he can smell it. There are traces of recognition growing like weeds in the night, but he can't quite seem to find their roots. Where had he seen that emblem before? Gahenna's throat closes in the blueprint of a growl but the unicorn silences her with a look.
Raziel does not sense the awkwardness that blooms and twists in ugly strides between them. He barely even hears August's voice. Water, Mors, imposing -- words that become meaningless noise in the blink of an eye. He is too focused, too restricted by his ideation. It's always been his downfall.
the great object of life is sensation - to feel that we exist, even though in pain
♠︎ ♕ ♠︎
If the unicorn told him those things his thoughts bend toward as though by gravitational pull, August would probably feel more comfortable, not less. After all, he knows a little of the way it goes - the screams and the laughter, the blood and the smell of it, the sick-bright sunlight through iron bars.
And the end without a goodbye most of all.
But there is nothing from the stranger and his companion, not even a response to August’s words. It is too late to be self-conscious of them, but rather than a man talking to a stone he feels like he is the foreign thing, a crass parrot jabbering away unintelligibly. As unsettling, the palomino has just begun to notice the way gold seeps from thin fissures in the stranger’s skin, like water weeping from a dying spring. Next he will realize it is the source of the scent of blood.
He’s starting to think he should have picked another tree when the unicorn speaks. It is old habit that makes his lips twist in a smile; here is a question he’s familiar with in various forms. Funny - this last year he’d almost forgotten he bore the tattoo at all. It feels like a remnant from another life.
“The servant’s kitchen of a gambling den, some five years ago.” Charon had done it, while Senna watched; August remembers gritting his teeth hard enough his jaw had ached the next day, and frequently flicking his gaze toward the auburn unicorn’s, hoping to read pride there. He’d always wanted to please Senna, especially then; he can remember the drink he’d poured August afterward more than he remembers the pain.
Now, further in time and character than distance from those events, his mirror-silver eyes find the stranger’s, curious. “The White Scarab. Do you know it?”
The White Scarab. Raziel leans back into his hocks a little and nods. Of course, he remembers now. "Denocte. Are you of the Night Court?" He had been there once, as a young man, shortly after the coronation of Maxence when the desert world had been skinned and remodelled for the hundredth time. In the heavy violence of grief he had made the long trip south accompanied by Gahenna alone. He'd told his family, those who had survived the rebellion, that it was a business trip; with his mother dead and Yamuna too busy climbing a social ladder he'd avoided his entire life, someone had to keep things ticking over after all. It was of course a lie.
He couldn't stay in Saudagar. In Solterra. Raoul was in everything, from the tablecloth to the sun.
So he'd escaped, hoping perhaps that it might bring him peace. Instead he had found wagons filled with the war-dead and a gambling den that stolen more than money from his pockets.
It had been a short trip.
Raziel's eyes track north now from the embellished scar and climb up to map the contours of August's mouth with a wolfish intensity. They look like the kind of lips that have kissed beautiful women or beautiful men or both. Thighs and throats. Fluid and fruit. Lips that slipped too easily into a smile. It is as jarring as it is enviable. For there is a looseness in the way the other man stands that makes Raziel feel like calcified rocksalt. He has never been that boy; that man. He has never known how to be anything that isn't empty. His orbit has always been shaped by that hungry vacuum of nihility: his parent's marriage, the shadows of soon-to-be-ghosts, the gold that looked grey through eyes that had never known comfort.
He can't stop himself now. From looking, looking, looking and it isn't his first time.
August is not the only one to remember.
It is summer in 99' and he is a teen with legs up to his chin. The air is swollen with boyish sweat. There is a thudding noise and at first he thinks that it might have been an insect knocking against the inner wall of his skull. It is a bloated sound, one of sweet death. In the end it is the smell that gives the peaches away; even all these years later he can remember how cloyingly sweet they smelled as they fell like bodies from the trees. He can't remember what he had been doing out there -- it was only the peaches and the moment he saw them. Raoul first, always first. His garnet eyes are feverish under a moist sun, his shoulders slick, his hair tossed lazily over his neck. Then her: blonde, pretty. That is all he can remember of her. He hadn't been looking at her. There is something giving birth in his stomach and its making him feel sick but he can't look away and he can't make it stop. Nauseous rage rises like vomit in his throat until his vision begins to blur and the world starts to spin and he wants to break her bones.
Even now, all these years later, with Raoul gone and the girl probably dead too, he feels his insides begin to coil in readiness for the retching.
But he gives nothing away to the stranger. He's always been good at that: iron hands and serpent-plum eyes hiding the genocidal chaos unfolding in the all the dark spaces beside his heart.
the great object of life is sensation - to feel that we exist, even though in pain
♠︎ ♕ ♠︎
August loosens a little, at that nod. It feels like the most human thing this stranger has done. The palomino nods, too, even has his expression slips back into neutrality. “I am. Or was. I’m…on a bit of a sabbatical.”
He expects the unicorn to say something more, after that (though their conversation so far hasn’t given him a reason to). With the water of the oasis cool in his belly he wouldn’t mind settling into conversation and letting the heat fade a little. Instead, silence spins out between them.
August has been looked at before - it used to be part of his job - but it’s been a long while, and he’s not sure it’s ever been quite like this. Whatever this is. It’s not want, and it’s not distaste, and it isn’t jealousy than he can tell (reasonable enough, there is nothing to be jealous of him for, not today and not for a while). It’s a little like the way the oversized hound is looking at him, which is just a little uncomfortable.
But he doesn’t dislike it, and he lets his mouth curl up in a smile for the unicorn to watch.
“Well. Thanks for sharing your shade. Guess I’ll head on.”
For a moment, he doesn’t move. There is an unless there, heavily implied, a pause and ellipsis in the dead space after the air was all silence again. He would stay, he knows, because he has nothing better to do, and because he feels a little reckless still, and because there is something in the hungry-empty gaze of this strange man whose body weeps gold that makes him want to linger.
Raziel is still thinking about them when the stranger replies with a fruit-thick voice and a smile that looks as ripe as the curves on the girl Raoul had coveted. The nausea is writhing like a maggot in his gut now and with each squirm it is growing harder to contain his need to scream. All he can see is his brother's mouth parting in what he supposed had been pleasure, his lips damp with her sweat.
What if he had been the one with his fingers pressing into her skin as though she were butter and he were the knife? Would that have sated his jealousy? His discomfort? He had never kissed a girl. He had never even courted a girl. It seemed likely that he never would. But that had never been the problem, had it? Young Raziel, handsome though strange, bore no interest in the fairer sex: they were but toys to distract his brother. A means to an end he had never wanted anyway.
“Well. Thanks for sharing your shade. Guess I’ll head on.”
The Solterran stares, knowing he should say something. He can hear his grandfather's voice like a bell in a churchtower (your brother says too much and you don't say anything) but his mind is theatre playing movies of dead people (you don't say anything) and he can't bear to look a moment longer at this man who makes him think of his brother loving someone else (you don't say anything).
So he doesn't say anything.
It is Gahenna that moves, rising like a black sun beside her stallion. Her body is a great shadow looming, her eyes a mark of something too old to measure. She has had enough. A ballad lifts over the dunes, made from the wind and the desert and it carries toward the triad as they stand suspended in a queer juncture, each wishing that it might soon end. The hellhound might have hummed a snarl had August not quite suddenly fractured the moment with his departure, leaving man and dog stuck in the same silence he had found them.
![[Image: deadj5s-7ea0ce6c-63ed-494d-a2b1-1ea29d98..._KYezSKapw]](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/62895f4e-8c60-4924-a6f1-54bf30743d42/deadj5s-7ea0ce6c-63ed-494d-a2b1-1ea29d98adc1.png?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOiIsImlzcyI6InVybjphcHA6Iiwib2JqIjpbW3sicGF0aCI6IlwvZlwvNjI4OTVmNGUtOGM2MC00OTI0LWE2ZjEtNTRiZjMwNzQzZDQyXC9kZWFkajVzLTdlYTBjZTZjLTYzZWQtNDk0ZC1hMmIxLTFlYTI5ZDk4YWRjMS5wbmcifV1dLCJhdWQiOlsidXJuOnNlcnZpY2U6ZmlsZS5kb3dubG9hZCJdfQ.No4YMruHY_LHkiZwS9oVnGKGelURHdwU3_KYezSKapw)
