SIX MONTHS AGO 

He awakes on the Solterran coast and does not know where he is. 

He does not know when the sea, the one true love of his life, decided she is done with him. He remembers very little. Only darkness like the womb, and tumbling, tumbling, tumbling. He does not know how long she has kept him swallowed, tonguing at his body as though he were a sore. It must have been eons. 

He only knows that when he emerges, his lungs burn. 

He only knows that when he attempts to run back into the waves and dive beneath the surface, taking a lungful of water would have killed him. His gills are gone. After another attempt, he comes to realise that so is his transience: he cannot change shape. The water will not take him. He strains his ears, listening, listening: and she does not speak to him. There is nothing but the crash of the waves and once, once, that had meant everything. He reemerges coughing and sputtering. The salt burns him for the first time in his life.

Orestes’ heart breaks.

He stares out at the ocean for many days, it seems. In reality, he stares for only a summable number of hours. Orestes waits from dawn to dusk, as the sun begins to shutter on the horizon, the reflection wavering far out where the water begins to curve on the distant edge of the world. How far he wonders. How far have I gone? He waits for his magic to stir; for the sea to speak to him in all her sweet viciousness. He waits for the weight of his body to become less, less, less, until he can transform. 

It is not quite darkness when they find him.

There are only two. They brandish sharp weapons and sharper teeth. They speak a language he does not understand, and looks like a shape he could once become; something draconic, with arching wings and razor-lined tails. He will later hear them name themselves kirins. He snarls and clicks his teeth at them; but where once he would have brandished fangs, he discovers the blunted incisors of an equine. They laugh at his bravado, and Orestes’ soul cries it is not bravado, but it is, it is, because the Prince of a Thousand Tides cannot change shape. They skirmish. The two gaunt desert horses force him to submit, and loop ropes about his neck. They drag him unceremoniously behind them and Orestes goes, because there is no choice.

Behind him, the sea goes: shush, shush, shush and he feels the salt water drip from his eyes. 

— — 

Orestes comes to learn the two horses are remnants of an ancient tribe called the Are’htai. It is difficult for him to understand them at first, or what any of that means, but he gradually learns there were once many such tribes in Solterra—and that is the name of the place he now inhabits, Solterra. They whisper to him that the land is in anguish and their god has awoken them from a deep slumber to rectify the wrongs. They say there are many gods in the land called Novus, but only one true god, and that is the Sun. At first, Orestes argues. There is the Mother Sea, and they do not understand. There is no god of the sea they tell him, in their strange, sharp language. There is only the Solar Gods and among them, only Solis. 

The longer the sea stays silent, the more Orestes is inclined to believe them in this desert-land. He does not hear from the mother sea and try as he may, he cannot change shape. He feels fatigue he has never known before, and the tiredness of a body too heavy for him, a body without the softness of water. They force him to eat, and drink, and still he cannot change shape. 

The two desert horses cannot change shape either, but they do not treat him with the same disdain as the old horses of Oresziah. Their names are Rah and Tut. He comes to understand they are outcasts, not unlike himself, and that an older emperor decimated their herds. Zolin Tut admits, with disdain, and spits upon the earth. But Orestes does not see the kingdom of which they speak; there is only desert, endless and fathomless. Orestes has no word for “desert” in his language, and they laugh at him as he fumbles to understand the heat and the sand. They detail a fragmented story of emperors and gods and sand, sand, sand. Everything is sand. And Orestes listens by firelight and moonlight and sunlight. The blubber that once kept the cold of the sea from penetrating the warmth of his core becomes sweat, sweat, sweat. 

He measures the days in the growing gauntness of his body. He has never thought himself capable of this complete transformation, from the sea to land, but as the days pass there is less and less magic in his veins. He feels it wearing him. 

One day he watches Rah conjure water from the air. Orestes does not understand. It is magic—almost the same magic of his old land… and he asks about the magic and Rah tells him he was blessed by Solis. It has made life possible for them in the desert, so far from the oasis the Solterran’s claim. As their understanding of one another grows, Tut confesses he has the power to put himself and others to sleep for very long periods of time, where they will suffer neither harm nor hunger. It is how he and his brother have survived for so long. 

And Orestes asks how old they are, 

And the two brothers answer: eons. 

“We can take you to be blessed,” Tut says. “Or rather, we will try.” 

And Orestes does not understand, but he goes, because he cannot change shape and his heart aches for the mother sea, who has abandoned him. On their journey they tell Orestes stories of Solis, and their lives in this strange land, and it simultaneously reminds Orestes of his old life and also becomes something he never could have imagined. 

They eventually lead him to a deep desert canyon and they search deeper and deeper inside of it. When storm clouds gather overhead, Orestes fears a flood; but Rah dismisses the notion jovially. He says: the rain will evaporate before it hits the ground. They lead Orestes to a shrine; an ancient, uncertain shrine. There are suns carved and painted into the stone, and there is the head of some great beasts that the twins say breathes fire when alive. There are quartz crystals and scenic runes on the walls of the deep canyon, and they say, “It is here. It is here. Now, pray to Solis.” 

And Orestes cannot fathom praying to another god. But he does. Because his life—and many lives before it—have always been one long string of religion. He is a priest in the most basic sense; a keeper of memories; and separated from the sea, from his magic, he feels that old identity fade every day.

So he prays. 

He prays that it is returned to him.

And Solis answers. 

THREE MONTHS AGO 

There are many remnants of older times in the desert. In their travels they discover a half-buried library. They cannot enter the building easily, and instead stare forlornly from outside.

It is there they meet the Takun. She is the last remnant of an even older tribe.  A desert owl sits astride her shoulders and gawks at them, unceremoniously. She is young. She says, “I am the keeper of this library, I am the Takun.” 

“What do you mean?” They ask.

And she admits: “I am the last of them.” 

There are many others like her, in the desert. Half-dead tribesmen who survived Zolin’s annihilation program. There are others, like Rah and Tut, who have slept for many eons. She shows them the library, inscribed with symbols of the sun. They stay for many days, and she shows them books and scripts and scrolls, and Orestes wonders: 

“Do you have any on the sea god?” 

But the Takun shakes her head. There is no sea god, she tells him. And Orestes begins to forget, as he opens scroll after scroll in languages he does not know how to read. Rah and Tut help him. And they read him stories of a great many people; there are diaries of the Solar Courts, of Day and Dawn and Dusk and Night at their inceptions with dynasties long past. There are forgotten wars and chance encounters with gods, and the name comes to him again and again: SOLIS.

“How can you believe in this god?” Orestes asks them. And they are taken back; they are furious.

But they recover from their rage. “He is the most present of all the Solar deities.” 

“How can that be? He simply watches. He haunts you overhead and punishes you in this desert, in this—“ And Orestes almost says hell, but doesn’t.

“We do not ask for empathy or compassion, Orestes. We ask for light. To see righteously and to never stray into the darkness.”

“But what about this emperor? What about Zolin, and this new one you have mentioned, Raum?”

And the Takun, young and fragile and wise, says: “Is the sun not responsible for casting the deepest of shadows?” 

They leave. When they leave, there is a horrendous windstorm. Rah and Tut find shelter in what was once some sort of caravan wagon. The next day they backtrack toward the library, but it is gone, and they cannot seem to discern whether or not their encounter had been some heat dream. 

TWO MONTHS AGO 

Rah returns from the city. He says: the people have forgotten his tribesmen. They have forgotten the looks of kirins, and they looked at him with the gaunt, haunted eyes of those who had survived a tragedy. They told the story of a madman and a basilisk, a queen who changed the desert into a forest and an ex-queen as silver as starlight. They whisper of a black stallion with his wings removed, dripping crimson blood now white marble and laughing manically. They mention men and women frozen in the form of stone; orphans; prisoners. They do not go into the city. Orestes does not tell them, I have seen souls Bound. He does not tell them of chains or gold or iron, only that: this sounds like a tragedy.

They return to the desert. They continue to tell him of the Old People, and Tut also tells him of Queen Sol and the monarchy. There is so much suffering. Orestes’ hearts break with it, and through it he remembers his own people: he was too late to save them from suffering.

The voices begin to follow him. 

Are you brave enough to swallow the sand, sinking a peasant and rising a Sovereign?’

No. He is not a creature of the sand. He is of the sea, the sea, the sea—

and now, whispers his new magic, the sun. 

The Solterran Seat is empty. Who is brave enough to fill it now?’

He is not a lion. 

—who might be brave enough to die a peasant and rise a Sovereign?

He has already died once. 

‘is it you? Is it you? Is it you?’

No. 

NOW 

But why are his legs moving? Why do Rah and Tut not follow him? He enters the city and it is the first city he has been in since Oresziah. It is nothing like Oresziah. 

It is blinding and brilliant and gold, gold, gold. Why does it not burn me? he wonders in the searing heat. He walks down the center of the streets leading toward the main keep and it is empty. His walk, long and silent and lonely, is cruelly reminiscent of his walk down the stone streets of Oresziah—were both not a type of sentencing, a type of condemnation? He lifts his face toward the sky and closes his eyes against the brightness, feeling the warmth. The city is a carcass, rotted in the sun. Faces fill the window; sharp, gleaming eyes follow him in his echoing passage. His hooves go click, click, click and he thinks, for some reason he does not understand, 

shush, shush, shush.

The castle is black when he reaches it. He steps inside to the gaping maw and is reminded of the darkest depths of the sea. His eyes adjust and he feels the stifling heat of the flames. There is a crackling like laughter; a crackling like consumption. He moves toward it; it does not take him long to discover the throne room.

He stares into the flames and he sees a thousand lives: 

He sees the depths of the ocean just barely penetrated by light, with the shapeless forms of his brethren, dancing in the stabbing, brilliant rays. He sees the shifting, transient, raging beds of kelp. He thinks of the burning oil the soldiers of Oresziah spilled in his beautiful sea. He thinks of emerging through them, gasping for breath through the smoke, wishing he were another shape, another shape. He thinks of his oldest memory, the memory of his people, as they met Oresziah’s first men over the stone bed of a fire. “We will teach you to love our island,” and the flames laughed then, too.

This fire is different.

We ask for light. To see righteously and to never stray into the darkness. 

Already, the memories of his people are faint and fading. His lack of magic makes them a dream. He had always been their keeper. The firelight licks his skin, turns him gold, gold, gold, and he thinks: I was the last Prince of my people. He failed them. He allowed them to become smoke and memory. 

The voice of the fire is challenging him, raging at him. 

He is not worthy; he has failed so many times in his short, long life. 

He is not worthy. But there is a nagging insistence he stay, a need that fills him greater than any lust or hunger he has ever known. You must try and it is a chorus of a thousand voices, the voices of his people. You can help them, don’t you see? With everything you have ever been. You were always meant to be a king— 

“Solterra will burn the unrighteous. This fire is Solterra. Do you really believe you are called by Solterra? What makes you think that her fires will not burn you? Fools!'

Orestes bows his head; and then all the way to his knees. He lays a supple cheek upon the stone before the flames, and the heat burns the soft flesh of his nose. He closes his eyes and sees the sun above the sea and he thinks of how all the places his mother could have brought him, she had chosen this place, beneath this sun, before this god. For a reason. Always for a reason. 

“They will burn me.” he says, and his voice is a prayer. “They will burn me and that is my duty to bear, for her people, and mine. For the people who have suffered the insufferable. It is only by burning that the world is purged; it is only by burning that there is chance for regrowth, for life.” He stays bowed for many long moments. 

After a small eternity, Orestes rises. His legs tremble and his knees ache from bearing his weight. He stands for a moment longer, staring toward the throne room, and he thinks of the story of Atlas: the curse of bearing the world upon his shoulders. Has that not always been my duty? For all people? Do I not bear that suffering better than any? He thinks of the golden chains. He thinks of Boudika for the first time since he arrived to Novus; and it hits him brutally, like a blow.

It is in your nature, he had always told her. 

Now, he hears the words. And he repeats them. “It is in my nature to burn, to sacrifice.” 

Orestes steps toward the flames. 

☼