The desert does not want him.

The trio winds through the canyon; the land whispers arcanely and Orestes finds the “words” (if they can be called such) untranslatable. Instead, the whisper of wind, of voices, of stone altars grates upon the ears, affronts the senses, suggests, go back, go back, go back as small spirals of sand whip up at Orestes’s feet, as his nerves threaten to fray at the edges, as all that he is trembles and wishes to unravel. 

Somewhere the sea is crying, as the sea has been destined to cry since the salt first sank into her waters, as she had been forced to cultivate within her a world no land-locked man could ever understand—

and so, the sea does not want him, nor does the desert, and the wind sounds like the cries of both.

Orestes steels himself with one focused breath after another. Rah and Tet do not stop, although their ears flick as if listening to the ancient canyon, as if trying to decipher the ancient pull tugging at senses that cannot understand it. 

Orestes has never viewed fate as a linear power. He has found, instead, that fate seems to weave itself with many diverse threads. Not only do they differ in colour, but texture, and dimensionality. This he thinks as he walks, sun-gold, through a canyon that is death-red. No, fate is not linear, and the desert shows him this. He shows them this in the form of a cracked sandstone altar; the desert breathes fate into his life in the form of beastly stone monuments. They are watching with unseeing eyes, and watching all the same. 

He is well-versed in ancient languages, but this is one he has never heard. The sky is weeping and the sea, somewhere too far, opens up a yearning in him like a black hole. Orestes is filled with dread; the feeling intensifies as he is faced with that altar, and the painted beasts. Around them the canyon dirt is red, red like sacrifice is red, red like sacrifice is always a spray of blood or a broken heart. Rah and Tet are whispering among themselves; they step back and leave Orestes facing the altar. 

He stands with an immense sense of gravity pulling upon him; and that gravity draws Orestes’s eyes forcefully to the stone griffin. He kneels. With his forehead against the stone of the altar, he begins to pray.

Make me a vessel of service. 

Orestes does not expect the immediate answer.

Is this it? 

The carved griffin breaks from her tomb. With a thundering crack and forward step, the griffin sheds her red-stone skin and becomes as gold and luminous as bullion bricks, as pure sunlight. Orestes keeps his head bowed against better instinct; because resting with in him, as archaic, as arcane, is the sea’s strength.

Orestes too, is old. Just not in this body. Once, he thinks, he would have become a leviathan to meet this griffin. His skin would have shed as easily as the great griffin had shed a form of stone for one of gold. He would have grown wings and a great and terrible mouth—

And none of that old, forgotten magic matters, now. Her wings spread over him and his eyes rest on her talons, too near his face. 

Is the sun where you truly belong, Orestes? He rises from where he kneels to meet her scrutiny.

Orestes doesn’t answer, because he doesn’t know. 

Fate weaves itself in nonlinear paths. It weaves itself in dimensions, in a multitude of threads, and it has weaved him here of all places, before a desert god. He says, “I am nothing but a vessel.” Orestes hardly finishes the response before the griffin opens her beak and blinds them—he closes his eyes, and even behind his lids his eyes burn, burn, burn. 

Then, the light diminishes. 
 
Am I bigger than your old god? 

His old god had been shapeless; his old god had been the mother sea, and in the mother sea, everything. But she had been just as cruel—that is the moment when Orestes wonders if all gods are, perhaps, the same, and take on only different shapes, different voices, different powers. Perhaps the whole world is not so different from the sea—

He has sent me to see if you are worthy of becoming Solterran. If you are worth of meeting with Justice. Solterra is rallying, her mad king is dying. 

Orestes barely refrains from flinching when she begins to move and, in moving, exposes a chalice full of golden light. Her wings become flames; the heat scorches him. Orestes listens and stares; there is something great and terrible breaking within him, a heaving as tremendous as an iceberg as it breaks from the land.

There is a ground swell in his soul; a changing of tides; a tidal wave that floods all that he is.

Come and drink. Reject your sea who so weeps for you. Come and be purged, let it burn from you every droplet of water. Come and imbibe the sun.

His Old Magic has already left him in earnest; the sea no longer speaks to him; and his skin has changed from the seal grey of the creatures that live within the water to the brilliant, brazen palomino of the desert. Orestes steps forward and in stepping forward acknowledges—

The Khashran are gone.

Boudika is gone.

They are died. 

Their Souls are Bound, forever.

His Soul is Bound, too, to this body.

His scars, streaked silver across his skin, remind him of that. The arcane symbols of sharks, suns, mountains, trees. Within them his soul screams and cannot leave his body; within them he will one day perish and, and—

In his failure there is only the knowledge that he is here, in this moment, for a reason.

He has been brought this far not to save himself, but to give whatever he has left in this life—

Orestes steps forward again and peers into the chalice. The griffin’s words sound like condemnation. Perhaps that is the only reason he feels obliged to accept the chalice. 

Novus is not his salvation.

Novus is meant to become his purgatory.

Solterra is his sentence.

The magic will be yours, if you are worthy.

Orestes cannot see, for the light that overflows from the cup as if the sun itself is contained there.

Does she not know?

Orestes does not fear burning.

He has already burned.

They have already covered his skin with the metallic paint that leadens the Soul and keeps it captive. They have already showed him what burning is and this, in comparison, seems only like a man turning to face the light.

Orestes reaches with trembling telekinesis to raise the chalice to his mouth. He drinks from it then, readily, and tastes the sun—

There are many forms of burning.

As the liquid—or light?—touches his lips, the arcane silver tattoos begins to glow as brightly as the sun. He swallows down the substance that is more than fire and as it drips down his throat it illuminates his flesh, as if the light soaks into the fabric of his being and saturates it, as if he is becoming light—

There are many types of pain, but no pain quite like the pain of becoming. No pain quite like the pain of our absolution, no pain quite like our births. And so it is with the sun that burns, screaming, every sin from Orestes’s flesh.

Orestes is too bright to see clearly. The light he has consumed radiates from him as if he is transformed not as a man can be transformed, but as something beyond substance. He is light and burning and a noise of pain that is quite like the inhuman, quite like the sea in a storm—

And then abruptly, as if flicking a switch, the light quits. He is left heaped on the sand  with the griffin having returned to a stone monument. Rah and Tet are not there. No one is there. 

Orestes does not know how long he is there. He would have thought the entire experience had been a dream, if not for the golden glow his tattoo-like scars emit. In the lingering silence, before the ancient altar, Orestes begins to think: perhaps the desert wants him after all.

"Orestes." ||  "Ariel." || @Random Events

wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight

and learn, too late, they grieved it on its way