The first day he sees her, Orestes believes his People have come for him. She emerges from the sea as if she is the sea, an extension of the waves that move pristinely up the shore to rest, and wait, and watch the waves crash again and again. It is dusk, and the ocean is at its most beautiful. He observes her from his citadel and he admires her. Orestes accepts it as a dream, impossible but appreciated, and turns away. 

The second day he sees her, he begins to feel uneasy. She may be there for him, but she is not of his People. Her shape is the same as the day before, and the water does not extend from her as if she is the water itself; she is merely a voyager, a dweller, of the sea he so fiercely loves. She is not the sea, as his People are. When he turns away, there are tears in his eyes. No. She is not the sea, as his People were. 

The third day he sees her, he is angry. She does not belong there. Her beauty taunts him, a reminder of the unobtainable. The lost. He scorns her for it, and her persistence. 

On the fourth day, Orestes stops looking for her from his citadel windows. He tends to business about the Court, and settles a disagreement between an ex-slave and an ex slave-owner, and he returns to his bed alone and dreams of a time when he had slept always in a throng of his People, and did not know the meaning of solitude. 

Four days later, he looks out the window again at dusk, and she is still there.

On the ninth day he goes through the desert toward the sea. He smells it long before he sees it, and the salt awakens in him something he often forgets. His memories do not possess the poignancy they once had. Instead, he feels his memories. They are more difficult for him to see, to actually bring to mind. The scent, however, awakens a sharpness he has not felt in quite some time; and for a moment he can almost hear the singing… 

But Orestes cannot. He instead listens to the shift of the arid sand and reminds himself he is no longer a son of the sea, but of the sun. And so his odyssey ends at dusk when she emerges from the sea on the ninth day, and he comes to her in all his golden glory, smelling of sand and sun and nothing of the sea he once belonged so intimately to. 

He approaches at a trot, his ears pinned, but stops short of where she rests. His tattoos blaze the colour of the sun, and in him brews something dangerous, something feral and forgotten, but not so forgotten he cannot remember the taste of blood.

“Water horse.” it is both a prayer and a curse. He stands a little ways off, and there is a look in his eyes that can only be hunger. He is a famished creature, a wendigo cursed forever to be starved. He is staring at a reflection he cannot touch; an act he cannot imitate. As he continues to speak, his tone takes on something nearly indescribable—it is old in the way rust is old, or the cliffs are, or mountains worn smooth by time. He accentuates each word, each name, in the dialect it belongs to. “Morvarc’h. Morag. Each-uisge. Cabyll-ushtey. Opopogo. Ceffyl dwr. Bäckahäst. Eich uisce. Wihwin. Bunyip. Nykur—" and then, finally, "—Kelpie.” 

Orestes was all of those things and none of them. Most belonged to the rivers and the lakes of the mainland, but all those things eventually bled into the sea. Into him. And all their names belong to him, to his people, as if they are the same entity. He closes his eyes for a moment and an expression of tight, pinched pain passes over his features—it is brief, but profound, before they open again and he stares at her with eyes the colour of a sea in a storm. They are brackish water, not their typical cerulean, and there is something prehistoric that exists there. On this day, he would be the sea in a storm. On this day, his flesh would yearn and yearn to become something infinitely more than flesh and in his yearning he would be reminded deeply, painfully, of his new mortality. His eyes are the only thing left that belongs to the water. 

What does it feel like to be Bound? 

Like this, he would always say. Like this. He tastes iron and copper and it takes him too long to realise he is biting his own cheek. The Golden King, the exiled Prince, he thinks of how once he had been the colours of the sea and now he wears the crest of the sun upon his brow and the gold of a wealthless kingdom, and he hates her for her beauty and her freedom, and he loves her for it.

“You are trespassing, water traveller. But you know that.” He stares at her for a very long time. He thinks, I will not be so easily seduced. 

As he says it, he knows it is a lie. As he says it, he knows it is too late. 

Already his heart beats like a newborn colts, and his external austerity does not reach past his face. His torment bleeds out his eyes in salt tears. 

She would never look at the sea as mournfully as he does. 

He wants to tell her this. And all the bitterness exists within him, but when he opens his mouth to say it, he only imagines it would be to challenge his own edifice, to claim some sort of righteous superiority on a life he no longer had claim too. He only sees himself picking a flower because it is too beautiful to live, too beautiful to exist upon the plant, and so rather than let that beauty be rotted it is better to kill it clean and swift. He clenches his jaw. He works his mouth. 

He says, “The sea loves no one.” And in it is every curse he’d spat at his mother during dark nights where his soul suffered like a ship wrecked in a storm. His voice comes out heavy, and husky, and there is still a bit of the ocean in it, but it is dark and deep and rotted. 

And they exist beneath the inky setting sun, streaked in colours of violence, and that sea whispers to him in a tongue he cannot speak back, and the light from within him burns with the ferocity of a dying star. He does not know what shape he would become if he could, but the warmth grows within him like a bundle of hot coals, and he feels a misplaced fury at this trespasser, at this sea creature, and still 

his heart beats

and beats

and beats

and he loves her 


so

so

fiercely. 

Orestes