Aspects of our lives will always haunt us, Orestes has found. The most trivial details become the components of one's own destruction. Those details are found in acts of emotion or desperation, the derailing. They are then revisited daily as transgressions against the self. The moment he had decided, in another life, enough violence was enough and it was far more noble to ask for peace. Was it? Was it? The first time he saw Marisol; the first time he had kissed her, and it had been all wrong, and had nearly ruined them. He remembers prison, and awakening, and his meeting with Avdotya. We have an opening for a Warden. What is a mistake, until it has passed? Until its meaning has met its fruition? For Orestes, it is his failures that haunt him most. They wear the faces of a thousand ghouls and almost every night, he dreams he dies. He dreams they kill him for vengeance, for penance. Orestes's fear is not the death itself; it’s the survivors guilt and how, to survive a tragedy, one must barter away pieces of themselves until they become someone else. 

Am I new man?

It is the question Orestes asks himself, when he first sees the man in the Colosseum. The stranger fights in a way that evokes primordial memories in Orestes; memories of a thousand lives, trapped into one soul. I have fought many times with those who fight as this man does. The dapple grey brandishes a trident, gleaming at the points, and that makes Orestes think of gutted fish, gutted whales, gutted sea-life.

How unexpected then, that the familiar stranger moves as the waves do.

Orestes cannot help it. He follows the man, throughout the day. They go from the tournament to the market; from the market to the festival, late at night, where they do not dance but only observe. Orestes sees the man's face reflected in finely gilded Solterran’s mirrors, and despite trying to ignore his presence, Orestes finds the stranger's eyes are drawn to him again and again. Where they meet in those mirrors, the stallion’s eyes are the exact same shade of blue as his own. But where his are sad, the other man’s are fierce.

He is talking to some noble when, from his peripheral, the seal-grey stranger walks towards a dimly lit corridor, branching off from the main celebration. 

Orestes excuses himself; the draw is irresistible, like planets in orbit. 

Or perhaps he is only a meteor, caught in someone else’s gravity.

Either way, he pursues doggedly. This has to end now. He must understand why they are there, haunting him; why they seem so familiar—and then he is struck through with a fear so great, it nearly immobilises him.

Is this the dream? 

The dream where, each night, he dies? 

In the dream, it is not the death that terrifies him. 

It is the fact he survived. He lived. (The death would have been a gift, a soft way to go to sleep with his sins). Isntead, day by day the magnitude of that is eaten away at by his Solterran magic, by his new god, by his new destiny. If I know them, I won’t even remember it. But Orestes goes anyway. He follows, and follows, until they are deep within the citadel and utterly alone. 

And then, he confronts: 

all the words are on his tongue, accusations. 

Who are you?

What do you want? 

Why are you following me? 

But when Orestes rounds the corner and sees the stallion backlit by the Solterran coast—the very same sea Orestes awoke on, when he arrived—whatever he might have said is robbed from him.

Orestes. 

It is Ariel, the keeper of his memories, who shares one with him now—through their bond Ariel pushes the image of himself, yes, himself and it is the exact image of the man who stands before him. The stranger's mane is tousled by the wind; almost-flaxen. His expression is devoid of life; hollowed, like the sea at night. A pale reflection. 

Orestes has no words. The shock outweighs his doubt, his trepidation, even his understanding.

Orestes steels himself, but barely. “Yes. And who are you?” 

Oh, if only he could see outside his body. If only he could see the meeting for what it was; his two selves stand across from one another, silhouetted by the ocean as it crashes in the distance. The sky is full of stars and a crescent moon and in the darkness of the night his tattoos glow cool silver, nearly to match the grey of the stallion across from him, dark of face, dappled as if in his creation the design was an afterthought of the mother sea. Those eyes pierce straight through him. And, strangely, he knows the answer before they reply.

But the name he knows—or knew once—is one he no longer remembers. And so he cannot say it. He can only wait. 

"Orestes." ||  "Ariel." || This thread is solely for development for Orestes and Bou <3 long overdue but kind of unavoidable at this point. 

in a dream

a thousand years ago