When Eve left the Garden did she glance over her shoulder and capture a last glimpse of what would never be hers again? When Icarus fell, did he laugh? Or did he scream, plummeting away from his joyous summit? Had the ascent, and the pinnacle, been worth the burning? What of Satan and his archangels? Better to reign in hell, than to serve in heaven? What of Achilles, and Patroclus? When Achilles’s pride had wrought the death of his friend, had he wished to sail home to Greece and forget all the glories of Troy, only to see one more glimpse of his companion’s smile? Did something in the hero Gilgamesh wilt the moment he learned of his own mortality? 

These are the questions that plague Orestes as he stares out at a sea, trying to remember a song as if through a half-forgotten dream. The words do not come to him; nor does the rhythm. Instead, he knows he has forgotten it only because there is an aching absence in his chest, as if someone has cleaved from him not his flesh but the space within the breastbone that all men carry their innermost feelings, and thoughts, and wants. Those things too, seem far away and inaccessible. The expression on his face can only be defined as hungry—but beyond that, famished, as if he is a man without food, without water, starving on the shoreline.

He does not let the water touch him. He stares at it distrustful and uncertain. When the cry splits the air he thinks, for a moment, it is his own.

That is the song.

But you won’t take me back.

Those are the words. 

You’ll never take me back!

That is the feeling of his ruinous heart. 

Orestes begins to trot, slow-fast, then slow, slow, nearly frozen, when he sees her on the shoreline. He does not remember her. He does not remember much of anything, anymore. Only that when he wakes up with salt tears in his eyes, that salt once belonged to the sea.

His voice cracks. His voice doesn’t come out when he tries to speak; only a strangled sound.

He tries again.

“It… it won’t take me back, either.” 

"Speaking."

Why would it, when it cares not for us?

The question takes him by surprise. It is the question he has asked himself many times. It is the thing he had stayed awake wondering, when he should have been dealing with matters of his Court. There is no part of him prepared to defend against his own inner monologue turned back at him; he is not prepared to answer the question that keeps him restless, keeps him hungry. So at first he says nothing. At first he looks down at her, expression hard, as if with something like pity—or disgust—or the two combined. 

 It is her grief, he decides, that makes him so uncomfortable. It is the way he cannot answer with any truth, with any honesty. At last he says, “She cares, just not in the ways we want her to, or the ways that we can understand.” Orestes does not know why the words emerge defensive, but they do. Orestes does not know why he cannot look her in the eyes, but he can't. 

Something nags at him. The same feeling returns: a song he cannot remember the words to, a song without rhythm, only the memory, only the knowledge that he should know it and somehow does not. Orestes swallows. He discovers it is quite difficult to look at her, anything about her at all, and he steps away, so he is facing not the stranger but the horizon, one hoof stretching haphazardly forward to dip into the sea. 

"Speaking."

She cares. You don’t believe that. Look me in the eyes and tell me she cares. If she cared, why would she leave us to die on the land, like mortals? Why would she—

Whatever feeble optimism Orestes clung to about the sea, whatever misplaced romanticism he maintained about the mystic and beloved place of his forgotten birth—well, it is dashed by those words, as if upon paving stones. The words echo. Why would she leave us to die on the land, like mortals?

Orestes feels his own heart beat. He can hear the blood in ears and he can feel, in a way that unique to those who have lost their immortality, his own finite nature. He feels it in the way the breeze is too cold, the way there is nothing to comfort him against her dangerous, threatening proximity. Eye-to-eye, he notices the distinctive markings that he had not noticed before. Scar-like and silver, they hide within her half-winter coat, as if forgotten, as if hiding secretive and punitive. 

There is a part of him that cows before him; yet it is small and overshadowed by the part of him that remembers being a prince, a king, now a Sovereign. Orestes’s lips peel back because he does know and her words have shaken loose something ancient within him.

“You’re right,” and Orestes’s voice is seething. If the sound were incarnated, transformed, it would be the Dead Sea on a raw-salt shore. “She has left us to die on the land.” 

Orestes does not know why he says it, besides what he recollects from journals in looping handwriting, detailing a life that was once his but no longer feels like it. Yet the raw edge is still there, untouched and wounded. The raw edge is still exposed, fleshy, stinging.

She is salt in it. Unwritten, she remains a stranger; a stranger to him that is not a stranger at all, and by presence alone begins to tear bandages and sutures from half-healed wounds. Orestes pressed forward and in a gesture guileless and childlike, presses his nose against one silver tattoo, as if it did not so dangerously resemble his own. 

  “She would do it because we are unworthy.”

It is the only answer Orestes, once the Keeper of Souls, has left. 

"Speaking."

If there is one thing that has never been in his nature, it is rage. It does not come easily to Orestes; or at least, it never has. Perhaps she is unworthy, if she would abandon her people. He wants to say you’re right. He wants to use the words to take up a new mantle, furious and—

Perhaps he will. Orestes clenches his teeth but it is not her, no, it is not her, it is the fact when she presses into him and he drops his head to offer an embrace, he knows he has done this same thing before, at a different time. Orestes knows they have been here before, simply not here. 

Orestes’s eyes follow the seaweed being tugged by the surf, being held by her hoof. She releases it and he finds the act painfully merciful considering their line of conversation. She demands, tell me your name and Orestes’s mouth feels full of salt, full of cotton, full of things that would make it impossible to speak. She is staring into his face and he is staring into hers and he knows but doesn’t know, he remembers but cannot remember and at last, heavily, he says, “Orestes.”

And in saying it, it has never sounded feeble. So not enough. A man’s name, that’s all. The name of a man.

He was meant to be more. 

Orestes knows it.

And he knows he never became it; 

and that is why he can remember the press of her body and how it fit when he embraced her, but he cannot remember why he knows. 

"Speaking."

No. No. No, don’t… don’t say that. 

He should be surprised. 

He isn’t.

In everything that has happened, Orestes still has a very firm grasp on fate. There is a part of him that expects a lifetime of punishment for his lifetimes of failures. There is a part of him that understands he will forever bear the burdens of Atlas—

if only Atlas were a man.

Orestes steps back and does not meet her eyes, this harbinger of his, this beloved and forgotten piece of his life. He understands but doesn’t. He knows but doesn’t. At last he says, “I can’t take it back. I’m sorry. I wish I could.” And, at that, at the idea I wish I could, Orestes’s voice strikes like a flint.

At last Orestes raises his eyes. It is what he has been preparing to say for a year; it is the one thing he had hoped he would never have to say, because it isn’t enough. “I’m what’s left of him, anyway—and… I’m sorry.” Orestes’s voice cracks on the apology. He says, in a voice ravaged with everything he cannot express, “I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.” 

"Speaking."