NATURE'S FIRST GREEN IS GOLD, HER HARDEST HUE TO HOLD. HER EARLY LEAF'S A FLOWER, BUT ONLY FOR AN HOUR. THEN LEAF SUBSIDES TO LEAF. SO, EDEN SANK TO GRIEF.

Let’s talk about endings.

Let’s talk about the way when the seasons change, the transition is often marked with the death, the sacrifice, of something else. Although the cold detached nature of winter is replaced by beautiful spring blooms, something is lost. (Where does the snow go? The winter birds, the sleeping things? Some wake up. Some never do). Then, spring becomes summer, full of growing and birth, and even in the growing there is a certain type of death.

The sudden acknowledgement that life cannot remain the same; in growing, it must change. The fawn transforms into a deer. The cub into a wolf. The filly into a mare. The child into a man. Some of these transitions are more volatile; a cub goes from being fed to killing to eat. A fawn might become a stag and battle with others for the rights to mates. A filly transforms into a mare who creates new life. The child becomes a man who might burn down the whole world. 

Summer becomes autumnal harvests; and then autumn becomes decay, and winter again.

Let’s talk about endings, in the way that each day the tide rises and falls. In that simple lapse of time, the water might lap up the history of an entire day from the shoreline. 

Let’s talk about endings, in the way a father glances at his children and sees all that they can become that he never was. 

Let’s talk about endings, in the way that we are lucky to feel good love, real love, once in our lives. For many of us, that once is not enough. The pinnacle is difficult to reach except in ephemeral moments, ungraspable, gone before we recognize their depth. And because of this, we spend our lives looking for it, knowing it ends even as it begins—

Let’s talk about endings, in the way that the things we love and hate (both, at once) come calling us at night. The lover we should not have laid with, the one we regret (but cannot regret so much we wished it had never been). The last words to our father, or mother, before they passed. Let’s talk about being a child. How even as we remember it, we are already grown; and the joyous laughter of our youth is corrupted by the years after, and all that happened we had no sight of.

For Orestes, it began with the sea.

And it ends with the sea.

His first life had been full of wonder. He thinks about this now, sleepily, with his cheek buried in Marisol's hair. Orestes had been a child for a hundred years. The first twenty-five he spent marveling at the jewel-bright sun through the gleaming sapphire sea. The next twenty-five he learned to swim to the surface; and after, to laugh with the waves as they crested toward the sky. The last twenty-five of those years were spent learning to become something with shape. He remembers the lives after that in imprecise details. The names, sometimes, or the feelings; he remembers all the lives he lived when the foreigners came to their island, and the white beaches became black as soot, and the sun no longer shone. The end to that had been falling out of favor with some deity, he is sure: he remembers now as one remembers a dream (incomplete, vaguely) that they had once been loved by the sea but somehow wronged the island, until the two competed over the rights to their souls.

The island, Orestes supposes, had won. But the details no longer belong to him. That is the blessing, and the curse, of living now in Solterra and Novus.

His last life had been full of wonder, too.

Orestes knows this in the way his eyes trace greedily the contours of Marisol's warrior face; and then they fall to the two foals curled between them, soft and winged, feathered with down. Aeneas glows with bright light even in slumber. (Orestes tries not to be saddened by the knowledge that he is also sure, in a fearful kind of way, that his son is dreaming the same dream again). 

But, the singing has not stopped since Aeneas and Gunhilde were born. He had watched so wide-eyed with wonder as Marisol’s stomach grew; he had doted so much attention, and affection, upon her that those in Solterra had begun to complain. Our Sovereign is not our own! they had lamented. 

But all along, they had known.

Orestes had never been one of them.

He had only given them all that he had left to give. And what was left of that, he had given to Marisol.

It is clear to him now, these things had been the reason he had come to Novus. Perhaps he had done enough good to deserve to sleep; perhaps it is simply a matter of the sand running from the hourglass, and his children's restless eyes flicking beneath their lids as they sleep. 

In Marisol’s first letter to him, she had written: All this is to say: if there is a day you need to come home, Terrastella’s shores are open. 

(He should not leave, he knows, the way he does. Quietly. Lingeringly. He should have not slip from her bed where their children lay heaped between them, planting a quiet kiss at each of their brows. He should not leave, he knows, at all; he should stay, instead of—) 

Instead of answering the call that he always would.

The sea, the sea. She is singing. She says, come home. 

Orestes does not know what makes it so irresistible. He had tried to resist for so, so long; the lulling waves beneath the bright, full moon. But now—he only wants to rest. He understands enough of life to know he will never find it, no matter how much he serves, no matter how full he tries to make his heart, there is something left unfinished, a question left unanswered—

He is so, so tired. 

And he cannot rest, until. 

Ariel is waiting for him when Orestes makes it out of the city. Ariel is waiting to lead him to the black cliffs where he had returned to Marisol once before; Ariel is waiting, glowing sun-bright, for Orestes to stand beside him and stare down at the sea. 

“It is time,” Ariel states, matter-of-factly. 

“Yes.” Orestes replies, in that soft whisper. “I think it is.” 

They will say, later, that a guard saw them leave the city side-by-side. They will say it was like two angels stepping into oblivion, perhaps; or that the sun rose on a cool spring night, wickedly, when it should not have. And then was gone. 

They will say, later, that the desert swallowed him. He left no note for his people, no sign. They will say that the desert swallowed him, as the desert is wont to do.

Marisol will know differently, she will know, because in his dreams he had been whispering, I must go home. 

The truth, however, is rarely of any solace to those left behind.

ooc: @Marisol ... and really anyone else is more than welcome to reply with reactions to this thread regarding Orestes's disappearance! There is a slim chance I bring him back to Novus in the future, when life is less demanding/unpredictable for me and I have some muse for him again. But as of now, I have gotten no enjoyment playing him and it has been a chore for longer than I would like to admit. HOWEVER, I will gladly state him being a Sovereign has been one of my favorite experiences roleplaying, and I would like to thank you all for that <3