Evening is falling. Spring has come to Novus, and another festival is being thrown. I walk with careful purpose through the meadow outside the Dawn Court, which is bright with flickering firelight of colors from the expected to the mystical. Everywhere I look, equines are dancing around the bonfires and leaping through the flames.

I imagine how they would look in stone, like wingless angels floating through the air; hair suspended, eyes closed. Perhaps when I return to Terrastella I might try and realize such a vision. For now, I weave in and out of gathered patrons, waiting for something, or someone, to catch my eye.

I spot a few familiar faces—a handful of students and staff from the Academy—and I hope they will enjoy themselves without putting their studies in jeopardy. Tonight, I am not a Headmaster. Tonight, I am Elliot. A man and an artist.

Tomorrow I will be someone else, perhaps. The festival is a stop on the way to Solterra, to deliver a piece to a prominent family. But tonight I am not deliverer; just maker, just seeker. And I am seeking something I’m still waiting to find out I need.

"Speaking."

i used to build dreams about you

Spring in the desert is warmer than it is across the rest of Novus. I don’t dislike the heat, and the sun does wonders for my gleaming, golden antlers and scales. I might look like Solterran royalty, but I smell too much like rain and not enough like sun. The sand covered streets, sandstone walls, sand this and sand there, it doesn’t offer much in the way of inspiration, that is certain. I could lay for days beneath the sun and do nothing here, but I would be doing nothing.

No, my inspiration is back home in Terrastella.

And I am here, delivering a statue to the Ieshan family. It has been complete for some weeks now, but transport and timing were a bit of an issue. With the Academy students deep in their winter studies and I being the Headmaster, it isn’t easy to get away. But with spring here, and the festival currently happening in Delumine as a product of both the Night and Dawn courts, everyone at the Academy is getting some time off.

I, of course, did stop at the festival before making my way to Solterra, where I am now approaching the gates of the Ieshan estate. I glance at the man guarding the entrance, as though he could stop me. A smile stretches my lips as my brilliant blue eyes meet his. “Open the gate, won’t you, friend? I’ve a very important item to deliver to your master.”

I watch as he becomes moldable to my suggestion, and turns to allow myself and my party to enter the sunwashed courtyard. It’s a shame the effects won’t last, much as they do with my students. Ah well, after this I won’t be needing his services regardless. I turn my attention elsewhere, wondering whose will be the next face I see.

"Speaking."

ometimes a hand doesn't know it's a hand until it's too late.

Andras stands at the brink of the meadow, the line drawn on a map between the wide-open sky and the last dewey tree. He is a shadow among a line of long afternoon shadows cast by the sinking sun, the time just before golden hour when the world holds its breath in waiting. He, too, is holding his breath.

In the clearing: long oak tables already spotted with thick, red and blue paint, the heavily pigmented sort used for body art, or war paint. There is a small smattering of faces, just bodies to him, with no names. He wonders if they are his people. He wonders if they are from Denocte, or the desert, or the coast. He wonders why he must wonder-- probably because he is here, at the brink of the meadow, watching from the gathering dark, as usual.

It's like pulling his own teeth, waiting for the sun to set and the course to be finished, burning rings and wide squares of smouldering coal that will soon roar to life. It's the sort of thing that makes savage animals giddy with anticipation. It's the sort of thing that makes Andras' skin crawl with the want.

Sometimes a hand is just a hand, palm-up, fingers curled forward in beckoning. Sometimes a hand has to be something else.

Andras wants to be the hand, as he stalks out of the treeline and picks up a jar full of brushes, some thick and some almost impossibly slender. He wants it as he sets the jar and the brushes aside and pulls one, medium-sized and square, and dips it in a pot of bright, red-orange paint. He wants it as he pulls it back out and it drips on the grass at his feet. He starts to forget, just a bit, when he touches the brush to his knees, painting a wet, red circle on each. The brush shakes as he sets it back down.

Sometimes a hand just can't be a hand. Sometimes a hand is only a fist.
Often, Andras is only a fist.

"Welcome," he says as her footsteps near his place in the clearing. His voice is thick with the strain of composure. He does not look at her because he is watching the brush, tremble, and wondering if it is with this giddy joy or something else. "having fun yet?"

NATURE'S FIRST GREEN IS GOLD, HER HARDEST HUE TO HOLD. HER EARLY LEAF'S A FLOWER, BUT ONLY FOR AN HOUR. THEN LEAF SUBSIDES TO LEAF. SO, EDEN SANK TO GRIEF.

Let’s talk about endings.

Let’s talk about the way when the seasons change, the transition is often marked with the death, the sacrifice, of something else. Although the cold detached nature of winter is replaced by beautiful spring blooms, something is lost. (Where does the snow go? The winter birds, the sleeping things? Some wake up. Some never do). Then, spring becomes summer, full of growing and birth, and even in the growing there is a certain type of death.

The sudden acknowledgement that life cannot remain the same; in growing, it must change. The fawn transforms into a deer. The cub into a wolf. The filly into a mare. The child into a man. Some of these transitions are more volatile; a cub goes from being fed to killing to eat. A fawn might become a stag and battle with others for the rights to mates. A filly transforms into a mare who creates new life. The child becomes a man who might burn down the whole world. 

Summer becomes autumnal harvests; and then autumn becomes decay, and winter again.

Let’s talk about endings, in the way that each day the tide rises and falls. In that simple lapse of time, the water might lap up the history of an entire day from the shoreline. 

Let’s talk about endings, in the way a father glances at his children and sees all that they can become that he never was. 

Let’s talk about endings, in the way that we are lucky to feel good love, real love, once in our lives. For many of us, that once is not enough. The pinnacle is difficult to reach except in ephemeral moments, ungraspable, gone before we recognize their depth. And because of this, we spend our lives looking for it, knowing it ends even as it begins—

Let’s talk about endings, in the way that the things we love and hate (both, at once) come calling us at night. The lover we should not have laid with, the one we regret (but cannot regret so much we wished it had never been). The last words to our father, or mother, before they passed. Let’s talk about being a child. How even as we remember it, we are already grown; and the joyous laughter of our youth is corrupted by the years after, and all that happened we had no sight of.

For Orestes, it began with the sea.

And it ends with the sea.

His first life had been full of wonder. He thinks about this now, sleepily, with his cheek buried in Marisol's hair. Orestes had been a child for a hundred years. The first twenty-five he spent marveling at the jewel-bright sun through the gleaming sapphire sea. The next twenty-five he learned to swim to the surface; and after, to laugh with the waves as they crested toward the sky. The last twenty-five of those years were spent learning to become something with shape. He remembers the lives after that in imprecise details. The names, sometimes, or the feelings; he remembers all the lives he lived when the foreigners came to their island, and the white beaches became black as soot, and the sun no longer shone. The end to that had been falling out of favor with some deity, he is sure: he remembers now as one remembers a dream (incomplete, vaguely) that they had once been loved by the sea but somehow wronged the island, until the two competed over the rights to their souls.

The island, Orestes supposes, had won. But the details no longer belong to him. That is the blessing, and the curse, of living now in Solterra and Novus.

His last life had been full of wonder, too.

Orestes knows this in the way his eyes trace greedily the contours of Marisol's warrior face; and then they fall to the two foals curled between them, soft and winged, feathered with down. Aeneas glows with bright light even in slumber. (Orestes tries not to be saddened by the knowledge that he is also sure, in a fearful kind of way, that his son is dreaming the same dream again). 

But, the singing has not stopped since Aeneas and Gunhilde were born. He had watched so wide-eyed with wonder as Marisol’s stomach grew; he had doted so much attention, and affection, upon her that those in Solterra had begun to complain. Our Sovereign is not our own! they had lamented. 

But all along, they had known.

Orestes had never been one of them.

He had only given them all that he had left to give. And what was left of that, he had given to Marisol.

It is clear to him now, these things had been the reason he had come to Novus. Perhaps he had done enough good to deserve to sleep; perhaps it is simply a matter of the sand running from the hourglass, and his children's restless eyes flicking beneath their lids as they sleep. 

In Marisol’s first letter to him, she had written: All this is to say: if there is a day you need to come home, Terrastella’s shores are open. 

(He should not leave, he knows, the way he does. Quietly. Lingeringly. He should have not slip from her bed where their children lay heaped between them, planting a quiet kiss at each of their brows. He should not leave, he knows, at all; he should stay, instead of—) 

Instead of answering the call that he always would.

The sea, the sea. She is singing. She says, come home. 

Orestes does not know what makes it so irresistible. He had tried to resist for so, so long; the lulling waves beneath the bright, full moon. But now—he only wants to rest. He understands enough of life to know he will never find it, no matter how much he serves, no matter how full he tries to make his heart, there is something left unfinished, a question left unanswered—

He is so, so tired. 

And he cannot rest, until. 

Ariel is waiting for him when Orestes makes it out of the city. Ariel is waiting to lead him to the black cliffs where he had returned to Marisol once before; Ariel is waiting, glowing sun-bright, for Orestes to stand beside him and stare down at the sea. 

“It is time,” Ariel states, matter-of-factly. 

“Yes.” Orestes replies, in that soft whisper. “I think it is.” 

They will say, later, that a guard saw them leave the city side-by-side. They will say it was like two angels stepping into oblivion, perhaps; or that the sun rose on a cool spring night, wickedly, when it should not have. And then was gone. 

They will say, later, that the desert swallowed him. He left no note for his people, no sign. They will say that the desert swallowed him, as the desert is wont to do.

Marisol will know differently, she will know, because in his dreams he had been whispering, I must go home. 

The truth, however, is rarely of any solace to those left behind.

ooc: @Marisol ... and really anyone else is more than welcome to reply with reactions to this thread regarding Orestes's disappearance! There is a slim chance I bring him back to Novus in the future, when life is less demanding/unpredictable for me and I have some muse for him again. But as of now, I have gotten no enjoyment playing him and it has been a chore for longer than I would like to admit. HOWEVER, I will gladly state him being a Sovereign has been one of my favorite experiences roleplaying, and I would like to thank you all for that <3