BE PATIENT TOWARD ALL THAT IS UNSOLVED IN YOUR HEART
TRY TO LOVE THE QUESTIONS THEMSELVES, LIKED LOCKED ROOMS OR BOOKS WRITTEN IN A VERY FOREIGN TONGUE

The glen is silent. 

The valley itself is slender; the sun streaks across the snow covered earth in a jagged line.The light just barely crests the trees. Each side of the glen is barricaded by tall, arching evergreens and pines; they are solid white, covered in ice and snow. The wind does not reach the lower valley, but blows the frost from the branches in fine, fine dust. It drifts so slowly in the air it seems suspended, catching the sunlight in minuscule, orbital spirals. 

A herd of elk move slowly through the distant trees. A bull raises his head and the light catches on his antlers, which are burnished the colour of bullion bricks. However, they are not so bright as the stallion that passes from the shadows of the pines into the light of the glen. The elk bellows and the clear, piercing sound echoes in the silent morning air. 

Orestes is squinting at the sky when he breaks the pristine surface of the virgin snow—he is squinting as he enters the valley from a downward facing slope and takes in a sight he has never seen. Orestes had only experienced snow a handful of times in his life, and never to this extremity. His breath rushes out, a whoof, whoof, whoof that forms semi-opaque clouds. He hears a musical, crystalline tinkle of water and follows the sound until he comes upon a slender stream, cutting through the snow. 

It is so far from the desert.

It is so far from the sea.

For just a moment, 

just a moment,

Orestes closes his eyes,

and breathes.

He is not a banished prince or a sun king.

He is not Solterran, or Bound Khashran.

He is not a leader, or a saviour, or a sacrifice.

No. 

For just a breath, Orestes simply is. 

FIRE-LIT, HALF SILHOUETTE AND HALF MYTH, THE WOLF CIRCLES MY PAST, TREADING THE LEAVES INTO A BED TILL HE SLEEPS, BLACK SNOUT ON EXTENDED PAWS. BLACK SNOUT ON SULPHUR BODY, HE NUDGED HIS WAY INTO MY CONSCIOUSNESS. THERE IS NOTHING THAT WON'T BE LIT UP IN THE DARK TORCH OF HIS EYES.

Is it heavy, the crown? 

Yes, yes, yes—

Orestes turns to face her. 

She is there, dark and feral against the brilliance of the snow. Like a reckoning. The silence might remain aside from that malignant voice, but he is in no hurry to reply. An ear swivels to listen to the distant passage of those brilliant elk, the crunch of their hooves through the snow and underbrush, the musical cry of the brook.

Orestes says, “Yes.” 

But duty should not be light. 

Duty should not be a feather.

No; it will always be iron, or 

gold, dense about the neck, 

or the weight of the sea 

when someone is sinking. 

Orestes does not know her name, but he knows of her. The viper. A remnant of Zolin’s reign; a remnant of Solterra’s violent, turbulent past. Orestes does not doubt that out of all the Solterrans, they have the most in common.

We have survived genocide.

But he knows even more intrinsically that she must resent him, another monarch, another sovereign capable of atrocity. “Why did you not claim it?” Perhaps he feels resentment, too, although he cannot say why. Perhaps it is because she is at once a creature like him; and utterly foreign. 

Orestes thinks in that moment his heart is cold enough to become a leviathan; a creature of the deep, the dark, of a world he’s forgetting. He almost remembers what it felt like to become a beast; a serpent; a monstrosity. Perhaps it is because he feels so far from the sun in that moment, but the golden glow of his tattoos bleeds from his skin like the light of a dying star. They become cool, silver, metallic. 

In that moment, he realises why she unsettles him. In her eyes, he sees the expression of his own people; in her eyes, he can remember every failure he has ever made. 

FIRE-LIT, HALF SILHOUETTE AND HALF MYTH, THE WOLF CIRCLES MY PAST, TREADING THE LEAVES INTO A BED TILL HE SLEEPS, BLACK SNOUT ON EXTENDED PAWS. BLACK SNOUT ON SULPHUR BODY, HE NUDGED HIS WAY INTO MY CONSCIOUSNESS. THERE IS NOTHING THAT WON'T BE LIT UP IN THE DARK TORCH OF HIS EYES.

There is an alien aspect to their meeting; an otherworldly aura possesses the scene. Neither of them fit naturally in the glen; it is apparent in their lean frames, the colour of their eyes, the way that even here they smell of sand, salt, sweat. 

Because I would never bleed for a people I do not care about. There is something about the brutality of it that strikes him; perhaps it is his bleeding heart. He remembers, briefly, his imprisonment. It feels as if it were lifetimes ago, but Boudika’s words come to him unbidden and surprised. “How do you not hate me? How do you care so deeply, even for your enemy? Even for your condemner?” 

Orestes will never have an answer; not one that made sense. Perhaps it is the sea in him, capable of holding so many beasts and beings that are living and dying, always. 

He says, “So it is better to let them fall under the hands of tyrants than take the burden of the crown?” Orestes’ voice is hard, for once—close to accusatory but not quite. It still borders on inquisitive. 

Solterra was not meant to be ruled by kings and queens and their pretty gold pieces. It is a feral thing, a beast that cannot be tamed by your politics. There is a reason every bearer of the crown finds themselves dead. 

Orestes cannot blame her. Her people are not dead yet; not completely; not like his. He smiles and it is a bitter thing, cold and edged as a blade.  “The yoke is on the world, not just Solterra’s desert. There is nothing wild left.” 

He thinks of his people, then; he thinks of how when the Oreszians dragged him through the streets to sentence him to death, they built a harbour, a dock, and ships with sails white as a dove’s pale wing. He thinks of how the gods are far, far away—even those that still live, like those in Novus. He thinks of the way those ships cut through the sea like so many whetted blades, taking distant islands, conquering more magic, seeking more, more, more. Always more. 

“Do not accuse me of crimes that are not mine, Khan. I did not murder your people; and these politics are no more mine than they are yours. I did not let them build a citadel in your wild land, or hunt the old tribes to the brink.” He thinks of how, in another land, he had let it happen. He had let the freedom of his people slip through his grasp; if not in this life, then in another. Orestes has lost too many of his people's Souls. He thinks of how, in another land, a city on a black cliffside mocked everything he and his people had been.

Orestes sees in her everything he has lost; it breaks his heart. Her face is scarred, dark, with eyes that burn in a way that only the tormented understand. She reminds him tremendously of his Khashran, of his warriors, with their proud faces and their readiness to kill. Yet she is harder, perhaps, than they had ever been. There is no softness of the sea in her; no gentle shush, shush, shush of the waves, longing for the shore. She is everything he has learned of the desert. “I only want people to be as free as they can be. Men have died for less.” But rarely more. 

The air is cold, cold, cold, and the magic of moments ago no longer exists. He takes his duty upon his shoulders once more, as Atlas would, and feels the heavy weight. Orestes does not mind being questioned; perhaps it is because he hopes that he can show her is no Zolin, no Raum, not even Seraphina. He is not Maxence, he is not Sol.

They are all dead. And he has inherited, instead, their broken kingdom. 

“A burning lion sat me on the throne, and told me I was ash. I walked through the fire.” The line of his jaw is hard. It has begun to snow. “I will give Solterra everything I have and if one day that is my life, so be it.” 

I have already failed once.


 @Avdotya ||  “speech” 

FIRE-LIT, HALF SILHOUETTE AND HALF MYTH, THE WOLF CIRCLES MY PAST, TREADING THE LEAVES INTO A BED TILL HE SLEEPS, BLACK SNOUT ON EXTENDED PAWS. BLACK SNOUT ON SULPHUR BODY, HE NUDGED HIS WAY INTO MY CONSCIOUSNESS. THERE IS NOTHING THAT WON'T BE LIT UP IN THE DARK TORCH OF HIS EYES.

Orestes admires her; he admires her fierce spirit, the way she contests him, as if he is naive. He admires the fact she reminds him so much of his own people. Orestes lets her believe it; besides, anything he said would not prove otherwise, and this he knows. He could tell her he knows more of “wildness” than any other Sovereign; but she would not believe him. Orestes could say that he knows more of “freedom” and the cost of it than even, perhaps, she. But he does not say those things. He measures her with his eyes. He listens quietly to her rage; the rage of the sea against the shore, against the cliffside, trying to wear at something that refuses to be worn. 

He knows what it feels like to be betrayed by a god; and has she not been betrayed, as surely as she has been blessed?

“A leader who would be willing to do anything to preserve the people she loves; even if that meant heading a nation she hated.” It is not ideal, no. It is not what anyone would want to do; but it is certainly one way to stop genocide. Orestes understands there are more reasons for her to reject the throne than try to claim it; but one who lives as long in her positions as she has... Well, they possess a certain kind of cunning, of ambition. 

I have made the mistake of trusting a king and his word and I will not make it again. 

There is something winding within him; something sharp and feral. It belongs to an amorphous self; a form that would have taken her confrontation and become a beast. Orestes cocks his head at an angle; he narrows his eyes. The gesture is brief but predatory, and then gone. “I do not ask you to trust me on my word, Davke. I do not ask anything of you at all.” 

I say there is no freedom.

It is Orestes’s turn to laugh. Oh, yes; there is something that builds him demand, steadfast, sure. There is something that builds in him as wild as the sea in a storm. “There has never been freedom. Not freedom as we would like it.” No. There is always bondage. There is always obligation. There are always pieces of ourselves we give away. 

It is not a threat when she says then expect it to take your life. 

For a moment, transient and strange, he thinks that to die on the Solterran throne would not be a poor fate. There are less noble ways to meet the end. “If it is not there, it would be somewhere else.” 

Orestes’s eyes gleam, and they are full of mischief; of wildness. “What is your name, Davke? Should I expect you to come calling, the moment I step astray?” Orestes knows the answer to the question before he asks it. But he wants to hear her say it. 

Then, his demeanour changes abruptly. His expression becomes hard; the mirth leaves his eyes. “What would you die for? Where do you see your Davke going in the war-torn desert kingdom?” He knows a survivalist when he sees one. 

 @Avdotya || “speech” 

FIRE-LIT, HALF SILHOUETTE AND HALF MYTH, THE WOLF CIRCLES MY PAST, TREADING THE LEAVES INTO A BED TILL HE SLEEPS, BLACK SNOUT ON EXTENDED PAWS. BLACK SNOUT ON SULPHUR BODY, HE NUDGED HIS WAY INTO MY CONSCIOUSNESS. THERE IS NOTHING THAT WON'T BE LIT UP IN THE DARK TORCH OF HIS EYES.

And in heading that nation, I would end it.

Orestes only appraises her. His eyes are as still and calm as the sea on a windless day; that is to say there is some kind of movement beneath them but the surface, the image seems strangely unmoving. There is a depth to his expression that is carefully unreadable. Orestes understands when something has little or no use; and the endeavour he has engaged in promises no satisfaction for either of them. The venom in her tone is a type of passion he has long-since grown accustomed to, in the voices of his deceased Khashran denouncing the virtues of their enemy, or of Solterra nobles chastising the lower caste. It  is a special type of arsenic that belongs to those who do not believe in mobility; who are etched strongly in their ways, unmovable. 

I did not need you to ask, your majesty. Orestes almost smiles at her heat. Almost. But he doesn’t. He shakes his head, perhaps a little sadly. The cold air bites at his eyes, his ears, the edges of his mouth and nostrils. Faeries are singing in his ears, but he does not go to them. The brook continues to whisper secrets, longing for the ocean it does not yet know. He paws briefly at the snow and glances toward the sky, thinking of how for some reason the air felt as though it held a storm.

“I imagine your spear does not lose its thirst for blood of any kind.” Orestes’s tone is noncommittal when he returns his gaze to her. Strangely, there is no judgement when Orestes states what he perceives as fact; he mentions her nature as offhandedly as one would a lion's hunger on the hunt. Orestes shrugs his shoulders with the suppleness of a cat. You already know the answer to that. She is looking away from him now. “I do,” Orestes agrees. “And I certainly hope you find your place again. But there are changes on the horizon. Good ones, I hope. It is very difficult to make them as long as those who have been wronged maintain their contempt and prejudice, as rightly earned as it may be. I do believe there will always be a place for the Davke in the desert, perhaps long after the kingdom of Solterra continues to exist. But if you ever desire, there would be a place for you as well within the walls of the capital.” 

She is not unwise and Orestes cannot blame her for her opinions on his court. Not so many years ago, he had the same opinions of a kingdom that had wronged his people in a similar way. Just as I presume you seek the same for your court, free as it can be.

There is something mischievous in his eyes as he begins to walk away. A smile hints at the edges of his mouth. It is reckless of him, he knows. But he does it anyway. “Free as it can be,” Orestes agrees. Even as he says it he wonders . “It has been a pleasure; but I think I’ve indulged in enough whimsy for the day. There are obligations I must be returning to… regardless, if you ever find yourself within the capitol Avdotya—“ and in that moment Orestes reveals he recognises her bear-skin coat and scarred figure after all ”—we have no Warden, and I can think of no one so versed in warfare and survival as you. Perhaps there will be a time when the Court no longer contradicts your ideologies so heavily, and I might have proven myself more trustworthy than the last few regimes. We have more in common than you might think.” 

Orestes lingers just long enough to allow her time to reply, before giving a respectful nod of his head. Orestes then walks back through the snow toward the bridge he sought passage on, faeries pulling at his mane and tail, their laughter like chiming glass. 

 @Avdotya || “speech”