I call my ankles by your name. When my mother dipped me in the river, she was introducing us.
Every emotion has a taste.
Rage is cinnamon whiskey or the tart blood that rushes out through clenched teeth over broken gums.
Sadness is: burning mesquite heavy on the tongue, and the humid air by the sea (where our funerals were held).
Love is: sweat gathering at the edge of the lips, subtle salt, and gingerbread from wintertime.
Hatred is: the hardest to describe, like too-strong salt, like the sea, gritty between teeth and skin. Like iron. Like copper.
(Do not ask me why love and hate are both different forms of the same thing).
Those are not all emotions. There is no flavour for joy; no taste of excitement; no sweetness to envy; no bitterness to regret. Every other emotion becomes not a taste but a colour: the blended shades of gray that exist just after the sun has set, and the sunset has bled from the sky all beauty.
Tonight, however, I taste nothing. Solterra is too arid. Winter keeps the air cool enough that I do not sweat. I am clean, and smell more of linen than anything remarkable, than leather or steel. It was not as difficult as I would have expected, to escort Adonai from the Ieshan estate to the border of Solterra’s crown city. Just outside the city gates, Damascus awaited.
When we arrived, the dragon dropped back onto his haunches, and held out two massive hands. The effect of crawling into them would forever unnerve me; although through our bond, I felt no resentment. He simply opened them to allow us passage; and then those claws descended with the utmost care, until Adonai and I were both cupped between them. The world narrowed; within that monstrous grasp, there was little space to be anything except for lovers.
Our limbs were one; where something of his ended, something of mine began. Wings and elbows and knees knocking; my horns soft tap, tap, tapping into his. I knew I ought to have said something charming; later I would regret my silence. But then Damascus coiled his quadruple wings and sprung from the earth; the wind rushed into my ears. With Adonai’s hair whipping wildly into my face, I closed my eyes: but through my Bond, I saw all that Damascus saw.
The desert like a scar upon the earth; the rugged city of Solterra growing small; the dunes that became a sea and then, eventually, bled into the water of the true ocean. I felt the pitch of the wings. Damascus’s great breathing; the way we began to descend.
Yes, I knew. Speak to him. Say something to that wide-eyed wonderment. Turn your face. Kiss his cheek. Anything. Anything but rigid, militant silence.
Damascus lands much the same way he had ascended; with a great coiling of muscle he absorbs the impact in his hind legs and balances out with his tail. The dragon is forced to take several long, vaulting steps on his hind legs before balancing out with his wings. Then, with care remarkable for such a tremendous beast, he settles his hands upon the earth and parts them.
I step out with care. At last, I turn to Adonai and offer him a shoulder to balance on as he descends. We had timed it perfectly. The sun is setting, and the sky over the sea is the colour of a slit throat.
I smile when I see his expression; but the gesture is one that does not resound within my being, that does not meet with the veins of my heart. Externally, I know, it is perfect. Had I not told Ruth, his sister, the trick? Practice, I had said, in a mirror.
Practice, I think. Practice, until you believe it yourself. My smile is bright, and mischievous, and it reaches my eyes.
(I wish I could tell him that everything I had ever hated came from the sea; I wish I could tell him that even the taste of it in the air reminds me of all that had ever gone wrong in my life. Looking out at it, I can only imagine a blood-red stallion running just at the edge of the surf, away, always away. Looking out at it, I can only reminiscence soldiers standing shoulder-to-shoulder as they faced the heaving monstrosities that slunk from the depths, as amorphous as water itself, beasts so terrible that even remembering them casts shades upon my soul. I wish I could tell him that I had seen more men than I could count gutted in the waves; and that the water, then, frothed and turned pink. I wish I could tell him I had once fallen from cliffs like those in Terrastella, and the fall should have killed me; but instead the only man I would ever love (who was not a man at all) had pulled me half-dead from the water, and brought me back to life. That was the only time his lips had ever touched me--)
My voice is small and boyish and nearly sad when I ask, “Do you like it?”
What I do not say, but dances in the depth behind my eyes: It explains all I am that I never can.
Angry. Restless. Roaring.
The waves are rhythmic; the ocean is much calmer here than Oresziah. I step forward with him, until we are ankle-deep in the still-warm sea. It does not matter that it is winter.
Quiet. Solemn. Aching.
I had never known a sea to be warm, before this. The sun winks lazily off on the far horizon. Damascus lays down on the sand behind us and exhales a cloud of red vapour; it is harmless, and dancing, and meets the waves only to dissipate.
Unpredictable. Soothing. Apathetic.
I cannot tear my eyes from the sea that I do not recognise. But, somehow, at last I look at Adonai. It is from beneath my lashes; shy and dark.
I am dying, too, I want to tell him. There are different kinds of dying. Sometimes, the dying thing is being strangled by something inside. Sometimes, the dying thing isn’t the body. Sometimes it’s the soul.
I don’t have the courage. It wouldn’t matter, anyways.
The ocean is beautiful; he wouldn’t believe me, that it could be anything but. I smile, a charismatic gesture, a grand gesture. “Is it what you expected?” I ask.
If this is repentance, it tastes like sun-baked sand. If this is repentance, it tastes like tears held back.
the grieved – are many – I am told – there is the various cause – death – is but one – and comes but once – and only nails the eyes –
I wait for him in the shadow of a creaking chestnut tree, grown from the silt that winds dark and snakelike besides a towering sandstone wall.
Long before this land was Ieshan, this wall was the only thing standing between its inhabitants and the terrors birthed nightly by the desert. I'd picked along its crumbling walk many times as a child, winging up to its highest remaining battlement to sink behind an arrow slit and imagine myself a soldier, or a paladin, or anything more glorious, really, than a boy-prince kept like a bird in a cage. Somber as a gravestone at the western edge of our property, the wall formed the boundary of my world. I liked going to it alone, sneaking away from the house before anyone was awake to deter me. I would skirt around the sleeping form of Mernatius (who, as the first prince's companion, slept until adolescence on a smaller bed tucked at the foot of mine), steal an apple from the kitchens, and cut through the gardens with dawn washing everything a soft, haunting blue.
I reflect upon these memories — dim skies, tart apples, Mernatius's soft-lidded yawn when I leapt onto his bed to wake him — with the solidness of the chestnut tree at my back. I dislike being idle; and waiting is all idleness. If I allow myself to listen for it I know I will hear the thud thud thud of my pulse, reckless and unabashed, while my mouth is waxen and sealed. I rub my eyes; they are dry from sleeplessness and bright, overly bright, with anticipation and its sister-dread. I am not afraid that he won't come. I am afraid that when he does, I will disappoint him with all that I am and not.
He appears as a blip on the horizon, a smear of shadow marring winter's greys: wide at the shoulders, narrow at the hips, like the long-dead heroes immortalised in the vases dotting our halls like trophies. I swallow, and taste the bitterness of the medicine I drained before leaving. I swallow, and remember the warmth of his mouth between my wings.
I swallow. He is before me. I bow, half-serious, half-jubilant, my wings curling into my sides. The sky, when we depart, is cloud-chased and ringed with gold.
The dragon — Damascus — is massive. And despite his docility, the dragon's eyes are too teryr-like for my liking; my uneasiness around gigantic winged beasts is Solterran and hereditary. (Yet if Vercingtorix were to lead me to an open pit and bid me jump, I'd do so without hesitation. I understand this with the utmost solemnity. Not because I trust him; not because I am enamoured with him. It is something harder, flintier. Pride, I think, shot through with harlequin resolve.) My breaths leave me in white clouds. With a nonchalance I do not feel yet act, I hope, with certainty enough, I lower my head and follow quick on his dark heels.
In the dragon's closed palms, all is darkness. I hear Torix's breathing as clearly as my own; we are pressed shoulder to shoulder, limbs upon limbs upon limbs. I feel every nerve in my body and too quickly, this close — the silence turns sallow and indecipherable. It had been comfortable before. I had bowed, he had grinned, we had walked. Quiet streets, quiet sands, sweet solemnity. But in closeness and in restlessness I wish to press my head to his; I wish to tilt his chin to me and to ask him what he is thinking. I do neither. If he turns to me I will smile, but in the absence of it I clamp my tongue and watch the sands darken to rocky bluffs through chinks in Damascus's scales.
And then — there, below us, is a sea like a skin of glass, or a ripple of Denoctian silk. I blink, before the dragon pitches, and I am knocked against Vercingtorix's neck. I forget the silence, the restraint, the dread. I taste the salt in the air, the salt of his skin. I say, whisper-soft: “That is it, isn't it?” and seek no answer but the brightness of his eyes, so that I may dub it ocean blue.
The sea-slick sand that meets me is a different breed than the shifting golden dunes I know. It is springier, easier to stand on, walk in. I shift my weight on it and were I less unmoored (were I the me of before, the Cleric of Piety and Marble) I might have found my fascination ridiculous. It is just sand; it is nothing; you are a prince with an inheritance of gold. Later, I would recognise that the fascination was as much a front as it was true. I feel now in halves: seriousness and jubilance, anticipation and dread. Fascination and front.
Commitment to nothing and no-one.
“Do you like it?” I turn to him, my back washed a violent red by the dusk, and wonder: is he asking if I am happy? Is to like something to be happy? I do not look at the sea when I answer. (I do not look at him either, not fully, but in parts: the horns, the sun charm, the scars, the limp. The gold covering his eyes like war paint.) “I don't feel like myself out here. For that alone—” My mouth flickers in distress. “—I both love it and fear it.” Because I am out of my element. Because here, when I am not puppet-lord of my surroundings, what does that leave me?
A corpse? (Not enough of one.) A commoner? (Dressed too finely for one.) Just Adonai? (And here is where hatred flares up like a salted flame. That I was left like this alive. That I was stripped of nearly everything, of brilliance, of grace, of strength. The old heroes died for glory. What will I die for? Not for blood, not for peace. Nothing but a withering away, season by season by season.
I was not even worthy of violence.)
My lungs burn with salt. My wing reaches for Vercingtorix until I still it, clench it, drop it. My black cloak billows around me like strange wings when I sweep down to the rhythmic tide. I do not trust myself to stand by him and speak, not until the burning stops. I will open my mouth and end up asking him to do something unforgivable.
I sink quietly to my knees in the warm tide. The ocean is beautiful, and I lack any description of it but this: that it is of a beauty that takes. “Is it what you expected?” A gust of wind throws my hair into my eyes. I tuck the salt-heavy locks beneath my cloak. “Not at all. You will think me ignorant, but I hadn't expected for it to be quite so—” I break off to nudge his shoulder, to point at a white bird flying past with its beak bulging out like a leather pouch. “—other.”
I inhale deeply. Salt to lessen the tang of iron. “If you sit at the edge of the Vitae Oasis, you will see the same sight of blue water scraping up to the horizon-line. I used to go often with a... companion.” I speed quickly over this. Mernatius is lost to me. “But it is not the volume of water, as I'd thought. It is everything else. A man does not feel mortal here.”
I turn to him. His dark cheek is lit afire by the setting sun. I see the way he looks at me, shy, dark, followed by that smile. I smile back. I am not convinced. “You are quiet, today,” I say, low and soft. “It makes me feel strange.” Like our positions were somehow reversed. His unhappiness becomes mine. I am anxious to find the root of it.
I will not say this — I will never say this — but when Vercingtorix leaves, he will have taken with him the very last part of me I can give.
I call my ankles by your name. When my mother dipped me in the river, she was introducing us.
That is it, isn’t it?
I hear the words, but feel, instead, the press of him against the alcove of my neck and shoulder. If I wanted, I might have chosen to view this moment as one of absolute safety; as a private sphere where only he and I exist. I glimpse only his outline in the dark of Damascus’s grasp; soft, and gold; the length of his lashes that brush so, so gently against my cheek.
My stomach is in my throat. I blame the flying, the steep decline, the way the air rushes past in an audible scream.
(It is not the descent).
No. It is Adonai’s warm breath, and the flash of his eyes, full of wonder. I do not answer, aside from that brightness of my own expression—but what I want to say, as Damascus takes us down to the seaside, is in this moment, we are gods forever.
But forevers never last; and before I know it he is stepping away from me onto the wet sand, and the aspect of myself that will always be conqueror, will always be warrior, thinks:
For the rest of his life, when he sees the sea he will think of me.
It will be my name upon the horizon. My name is written into the wet, strange sand. My name is on the breeze. My name is in his eyes when he turns back toward me, wearing an expression I have never quite seen before in my life. I recognize pain. I do not recognize this pain, not fully—and I briefly wonder if this had been a mistake, until he answers. I don’t feel like myself out here. For that alone—I both love and fear it.
There is so much within me.
There is so much within me, clamoring to escape; words unsaid; promises unkept; wants and needs and hatreds contending within the too-small space of my heart. To save. To condemn. My expression flashes, briefly, with this turmoil—before I settle on a smile, small and perhaps too sad for the occasion.
“The sea is the thing that taught me love and hate and fear are not all so different,” I confess, with a lover’s quiet tongue. A voice for bedrooms, and poetry, and promises of more I cannot make.
He is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, silhouetted before the too-blue waves. Ethereal. He is halfway to celestial; gold, and gold again, with the soft omnipotence of otherness. Does he not know, he is what is other? And yet—I know I cannot be gentle enough with him. I know the way my affections corrode, even the most extraordinary.
I know the way I cannot help but ruin those I touch.
I had stood away, only a few feet back as he dropped to his knees in the gentle surf—but I can no longer restrain myself. It was his wing, outstretched—his wing, which reached to touch me and then decided otherwise. I do not refrain.
Because I am already doing the unforgivable. I touch the soft hair at the nape of his neck with my nose; I let the wind whip it, stinging, across my cheek before I lay it flat against his side. Brief. So, brief—and then I am pulling away. Not at all. You will think me ignorant, but I hadn’t expected for it to be quite so—other. He touches me, and it is my undoing.
I smile a knowing smile. Because, after all, I understand. After all this time, I belong to the sea in a way that I belong to nothing else. It is the only thing that remains familiar in this turbulent life. “I do not think you ignorant. Quite the opposite, in fact. Most are awestruck, and captivated by the beauty. I do not think it is beautiful—I think… it is as you say. Other. But it’s taken me almost a lifetime to understand that.”
I listen quietly as he tells me of Vitae Oasis, and his companion—when he draws away, I want to pursue the line of conversation, and file away my questions for later. I do not fear Adonai’s past; I do not fear it because I know it cannot be as terrible as my own, and—well, I understand the importance of companions. "Perhaps you could take me sometime. You could show me." I do not know why it already seems too late to ask.
My mouth is dry when he looks at me; he smiles back, and I imagine it is as unconvincing as my own. He remarks on my different disposition. You are quiet, today. It makes me feel strange.
I always find myself wanting to lie to him. I always find myself wanting to be someone else, beneath his gaze. I think, briefly, of my interaction with Ruth—how she had seemed so unimpressed when I remarked on Adonai. But then again, she seemed unimpressed about everything.
But this is why, I think. This is why he has somehow become special to me; he makes me want to tell the truth, even when a lie would be easier; even when a lie comes more readily to my lips. I take too long to respond, I think; looking not quite at him, but beyond him, toward the horizon.
“My entire life, I fought a war by the sea.” I admit, aloud. It feels fable-like; as if the confession belongs to someone else, or is a line from a story I once read, but did not live. “It—it is strange, to be by it, and feel no fear.”
I cannot explain the gravity that draws me to him; a meteor in orbit; a meteor that will collide, doubtlessly, in a way that causes damage. This, however, is gentle—it is the quiet flick of my leonine tail against the top of the waves, spraying him gently with an elegant fan of water.
(And, I suppose, I do not give him the full truth—I do not tell him that Damascus holds several vials of silver pegasus blood that looks like starlight liquified. I do not tell him that I have done an atrocious thing—perhaps, because, I do not even recognize it as atrocious—in order to… see if I can save him).
I meet his eyes, and smile—it is the first one since the chestnut tree that seems genuine. Then, however, I cannot help but somber, when I ask:
“Adonai? Why do you not want to be saved?” I cannot meet his eyes when I ask it; because in the asking, there is an underlying question. If I could save you, would you let me?
I wish I did not feel so mortal, here. I wish I could not feel my pulse in my throat; or that I did not feel the reminiscent sting in my leg, from my fall by the sea. I wish the gentle lull of the waves did not remind me so unforgivably of Khashran singing beneath the waves; an eerie call, unrepeatable, unexplainable. I have seen too many die by the sea, to not feel as if upon it's precipice one is closer to the dawning, and ending, of life.
A man is always mortal. Even when they fool themselves into believing a moment has the capability of being eternal. The sunset has become the color of a two-day bruise. There is a color of blue on the horizon that exists only in this twilight moment; that exists only as the sun first disappears, and the sky and sea kiss.
the power of youth is on my mind / sunsets, small town, i'm out of time / will you still love me when i shine / from words but not from beauty
When he takes me to see the ocean, I had thought gravely, as I'd lain awake in my bed hours after the party's close, I think that will be the end of it.
The end of pretending that this — whatever this was — would remain as a simple fancy. I knew then that I couldn't do it. Heated kisses, warmed beds, and then a quick, casual farewell, everything but regret staining black my smile. I had prayed to Solis that I wouldn't forget him. I should have known better than to call upon our gods.
Forgetting had never been a possibility. The well, the blue flowers, the eucalyptus as slender as saplings; the scene was immortalised in my mind like a painting. If I closed my eyes, I would see it. Stone well, blue daisies, eucalyptus. The offering of water in a bucket. And then — the song of a lyre. Battle leather and sword polish. A war room, a bed room. His shadow stretched long as it slipped out the door. What was it to me to add the sea to this motley collection?
It was over when I had learned his name.
“The sea is the thing that taught me love and hate and fear are not all so different.” I study the wrenching of his expressions, as changeable as the rolling clouds, with the astuteness of a scholar excising the object of his obsession for faults. If I find one, I tell myself desperately, then there is hope yet. Hope that I am not so utterly blindsided that so simple a task becomes impossible. But when I look, there is nothing. He can do nothing, say nothing, that I will hate. Should I greet this with relief? Where is no hate, there can be no —
My skin feels scraped raw by the tossing winds.
“Love and hate and fear,” I whisper, my voice like a Delphic chant. The coloured fumes exhaled by his dragon leap about us in a swirling, gleaming red. It makes me confess: “There was a time I would never have thought that I knew them, and that is why—” I turn away from him, my ankles sinking to meet the sand. “I was always too late to act.” Too late, or purposefully ignorant? I cannot tell; I do not wish to know.
My smile edges into bitterness and I add, almost unthinkingly, “When my mother and then my father passed, it wasn't their obituaries but my tearless apathy that fronted the papers the next day. That is what passes for scandal, in a court grown restless by a lack of war.” Marblesque, refined, unforgiving. That was what I had been. If he had met me then, my eyes as grey as sleet, would I have intrigued him still?
The tide is as warm, I think, as blood. I have never known enough of it to be certain (only in fine, near artful splatters), yet — Ruth would know. Whether she has seen the ocean herself is unknown to me, and as the gentle waves eddy around my knees, I resolve to ask her to accompany me to visit it one day. Perhaps she would like it, or at least find it agreeable, and — my mouth curls like wet parchment — far from the house, there will be less risk of hostile ears buzzing about us like hornets.
It is of this that I am brooding over, when I hear Vercingtorix settle besides me, sinking down into the foaming surf. My pulse jumps when I feel his nose against my neck; automatically I turn to meet it, to savour its warmth, yet too quickly he draws away. I frown before I am aware of it. My correction comes quick yet I needn't have bothered. His mouth opens to speak, and his gaze is warm yet faraway. “I do not think you ignorant... I think… it is as you say. Other. But it’s taken me almost a lifetime to understand that.”
This close, I see the curl of his dark lashes, the metallic sheen of his golden markings. He moves his head and the flakes of gold in his horns wink like stars in the night. I could study every inch of him until my death, and still not be satisfied. There is always something I have missed, something I am terrified I have forgotten. Has it only been a week since I'd traced the path of his scars as he'd lain beside me? I blink. This is agony.
I turn to watch the sea. “You mustn't think me wise. It only means that I have spent far too long thinking over what to say to impress you.” I grin, before it is twisted apart by a rough, wet cough. A reminder that however far I stray, I cannot leave behind my body. I stoop over, my face in my knees, and sigh. When I draw myself up again I wear a faint smile and a fainter dash of black hatred in my eyes, gone before it can mean anything. Love, hate, fear. How correctly he has captured it.
Meanderingly I tell him of the oasis, of my sobering conclusions. “Perhaps you could take me sometime. You could show me,” he says, and I nod. Was I waiting for it? For the promise of another visit? It is my turn to bring my nose to his neck, to exhale softly in his wind-tossed hair. “It is not too far from the house. I shall arrange the caravan, unless — ” I pause to glance sidelong at the dark form of his dragon, a mountain encircling us into seclusion. “ — Damascus doesn't mind, again. He is less nosy than a driver.” I smile slyly against his cheek. “He isn't watching, is he?”
I grow quiet again when he tells me about the war, and its setting besides the sea. Sharply I am reminded of the weapons keep, of the line of polished axes, of his detachment when he had told me of his life's occupation. Of my empty I'm sorry, of his silence. “So that is why —” My voice dips so low it is barely audible. “It is the weapon's room all over again.” It is too late; we are already here. But I must tell him this anyway. I shift until I am front of him, silhouetted by the fading light. “I seem to have a talent in dragging forth from you your most painful memories. I — I know nothing of war. Forgive my ignorance. I am a prince in a court infamous for its warriors, yet you are the first soldier I have truly known.”Ironic, is it not?
We, the ignorant Solterran nobility. Little wonder we are so collectively despised.
I snort wryly when he flicks the fan of water at me. Water droplets gather and fall from my lashes. I think about how it would feel if I could tackle him into the surf, laughing. If I could run down the beach, ankles flashing. If I could take into the air, like an osprey. I think of all of this and more; I think about what I would give to have it back.
I think so deeply that I almost miss his soft question. “Adonai? Why do you not want to be saved?” My brain processes it too slowly. Silence, then, as pain climbs to sit upon my chest. My eyes go to his yet do not find them; I am unsure of his meaning, until I am.
I wonder what he will see when he looks at me.
Fury? (It is not an emotion I can summon so quickly.) Grief? (I have grieved. It has never been cathartic.) Emptiness? I clear my throat; blue sunset paints across his. The answer is simple. It is: “Because I cannot be saved. To be restored, to what I was.”And anything less is unacceptable. My face draws together, paleness and gauntness. “My sister has told me of this; I have read the studies myself. The damage that has been done is medically irreversible. Perhaps there exists a treatment to stop the deterioration, but — I would refuse it.” Salt sprays into my eyes as I push myself hastily up to standing, before ripping my cloak from my shoulders and tossing it to the sand. I am not angry.
I am not angry.
“Look at me, Vercingtorix. I cannot do — anything. I cannot run down this beach. I cannot wield high a sword. I cannot take into the sky. I cannot even look at my own reflection because it revolts me.” My voice is thin and high. I almost laugh. I am not angry. “If I cannot be restored to what I was, then I wish to die.”
The words love and hate and fear whispered by his tongue do not seem so severe, so irrevocable. Yet, they are words that still turn his face away; he turns out toward the open sea, ankle-deep in the water. (I wish I could tell him that salt water heals; I wish I could say that it soothes aches and calms the mind).I was always too late to act.
I do not mean to smile; but it appears, naturally and without thought. Perhaps for the first time tonight. “In that, we complete each other. I have always acted too soon, for the exact opposite reason.” I had been born knowing love and hate and fear. I had told Bondike, once, love and hate belong to the same vein; they are two parts of a whole and, sometimes (especially now, on the fringe of a world, living a shadow of a life) I think it is fear that motivates both.
I want to ask, what changed. I want to ask how he learned to know them. The smile is brief and flitting; he grows bitter, briefly, as he confesses to his apathy, alongside the death of his parents. I nearly ask, is that how you felt? Or is it only how you were received? But I recognize that it doesn't matter, not really. It is difficult for me to imagine him so cool; and then, abruptly, it isn’t. I remember when we had first met and the front he had given; calm, controlled. I say nothing to his confession; but my expression makes it exceedingly clear I do not judge him. If anything, I understand—I sympathize.
In the military, they call it bearing. It is defined as “conducing oneself in a professional manner to bring credit upon oneself and their organization.” The recitation is on my lips as if I had studied the material yesterday, despite being a freshman lesson at the academy, belonging to children. It is the first thing they teach us, I think—to wipe expressions from our faces cleanly, neatly, so that we might one day march into war without a blight of fear, or anger, or concern. It demands confidence, command, and a high standard of appearance and behavior.
Yet, at the end of the day, it is not so different from apathy. As a first year cadet, I had kept my face perfectly straight as they beat the boy in formation next to me until they broke his leg.
When I betrayed Boudika to the commanding general, I had not allowed my expression to waiver. When I betrayed the only person who had ever loved me—the me that is me, not the me of pretenses, not the me they had always imagined—I never cried, or broke, or raged. It was simple. A matter of fact.
That doesn’t mean the anger wasn’t there, or the fear. That doesn’t mean that beneath the surface of indifference there was not a sea of contempt.
“What one views as apathy, another understands as composure,” I eventually offer, when I settle into the water beside him. It goes against every instinct of self preservation I have ever learned; yet, it is thrilling in its own way, especially where it fills the spaces between us. I close my eyes briefly and let it caress me; the thing that once held all my fears is now as innocent as light.
You mustn’t think me wise. It only means that I have spent far too long thinking over what to say to impress you. I might have laughed aloud—the smile is there, the building amusement—if not for the cough that wracks him suddenly. The smile fumbles; and returns, more sadly than it was intended. “I am not difficult to impress,” I lie, quietly, in a way that sounds like the truth.
We continue on, as if it had never occurred. As if I could not hear the blood rattle in his lungs; as if I did not see the fragility of his mortal body.
As if I did not know what it sounds like to be dying.
It is not too far from the house. I shall arrange a caravan, unless—
Still, we talk of the future. Perhaps that is the only way to make life bearable; to live with one foot in the present and another in the promise of a day that might never come. “Damascus doesn’t mind,” I promise, sparing a glance at my Bonded—his eyes are not open, but I know him too well to think that he is not listening intently to our conversation. “No, not at the moment.” Should I tell him that we share a mind, I wonder? Would it frighten him to know Damascus is my sins come to life, pieced together with the broken fragments of my soul? Or so, anyways, the legends suggest.
So that is why—It is the weapon’s room all over again.
This is a conversation I do not want to have. “Adonai—one of the reasons I enjoy your company is because you know nothing of war. There is nothing to apologize for.” I mean it. It is the first time I have been to the sea and I do not feel the need to abandon it; it is the first time I have been to the sea, in all my life, and tried to sea the beauty of it before I acknowledge the bestiality.
(Yet, am I not touched by the sentiment? By the grief he wears, for me? He blocks, for a moment, the bruised-blue sky. Brief, ephemeral, his silhouette is all I can see; and then my eyes focus on the details, on the elegant spire of his horn, the dream-blue of his eyes (a blue I have never seen anywhere else, at that). In this soft, faded world he looks less gold and more ivory—more pearlescent. I nearly tell him that the night I spent with him, the memories were forgotten—they faded to the soft rasping of his breath, and the fever warmth of his skin.
I do not.
It confesses too much, and nothing at all, to say, I slept more soundly next to you.
And, anyways, it is my turn to challenge his sensitivities. I am almost expecting the sudden intensity of his expression, of his words. He does not answer for longer than I expect, however; the sea is lulling, and quiet, and somewhere on the horizon the first stars are just beginning to appear, more like the ghosts of stars than an actuality, than a truth. His words sound a bit like that; like stars, fading into the horizon. restored to what I was, he says, and I do not quite understand.
Look at me, Vercingtorix. I cannot do—anything. I cannot run down this beach. I cannot wield high a sword. I cannot take into the sky. I cannot even look at my own reflection because it revolts me.
I do not recognize this Adonai; this wire-thin angst, trembling beneath the surface of princely composure. No, I do not recognize him—and simultaneously, I know him too well. His voice becomes a reflection of what I have told myself a hundred times over; not on a basis of my physicality, but on a basis of what I have seen my soul become. (And still, in my arrogance, I do not even try to imagine a life where I could not run, could not find flight in my speed or prowess in my strength. It is too foreign to me, too close to death, for me to even acknowledge). I am silent, not because I do not know what to say, but because—
Well.
Because of love, and hate, and fear.
I am afraid of what consequences my words might evoke.
And so rather than speak immediately, I turn to glance up at him where he stands. He is righteous in his displeasure, in his contempt; I, for once, am looking up at him and the cloak that billows away, into the sand. I take a moment to admire the fine planes of his face; to memorize the curve of his brows, the pinched expression in his eyes that says, there is no other way.
Overhead, a flock of birds flies past. They are darker silhouettes in a dark sky. The only light left is luminescent, the memory of light, upon the endless horizon. It bathes us in blue; it denies us our colors; until our tragedy is grayscale and indigo, is bled out of our golds and whites. We are stark and hard and where he is burning, I am cool; I am the balm; I am the quiet, whispering sea.
“‘Let me not then die ingloriously and without struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.’” My voice does not sound like my own, quoting poetry, quoting the tale of warriors and princes, of boys destined to die on sieged beaches. At last, I rise—I rise to glance down at his burning and feel, coiling and uncoiling within me, the tension of all that I have seen lost and lost again.
“Adonai—for whatever it is worth… none of us can be restored to what we were.” I understand he means physically, and I do not—but there is an urgency to my voice, a plea curling up the last syllable of his name. Please, listen. I am not a man to beg. “We are never what we once were, even in perfect health. So choose something else. Become something different; something more.”
There is no softness in my voice; no gossamer edge to my expression.
It is called bearing. Beneath it hides an abyss, a black hole, an ocean teaming with hungry beasts. It is called bearing, where my expression is confident, collected, where I inform him with practiced assurance: “I have found something—I have found something, I think, that might save you.”
Damascus cracks open a monstrous, opalescent eye. The world returns to colors so extraordinary, so horrific, they cannot be imagined.
"Do you trust me?"
That is what Bondike had asked, before he told me the truth.
It is what I ask now, before I commit the unforgivable.
young enough to believe nothing
will change them, they step, hand-in-hand, / into the bomb crater.
I was barely taller than the gold lapel of my father's hunting cloak when I caught and killed my first teryr.
The lack of iridescence in the beast's dagger-length tail feathers meant it was no older than an adolescent; the gleaming black pearls of its eyes were the size of my mother's best dessert plate. I remember how it had felt, sending that arrow soaring into its breast. The arrow had been made of dogwood; scraped and oiled and fletched by the best craftsman in Solterra, topped with a head of obsidian. It was a wicked arrow, a killing arrow.
I had saved it to crown the young teryr's heart.
I remember the weight of my father's head on my shoulder, the smell of the almonds he rubbed every morning into his hair, when he nosed proudly at my bloodstained cheek. The teryr had scratched three long gashes into my face, just below my eye, as it had thrashed in the sand after my first arrow had snagged it out of the sky like plucking a star.
I remember the sweet ache in my bones when I had bared my throat to the moon and screamed my victory to the sleeping kingdom of blood and sand and savagery. My father's wards had laughed, sweat pouring down all of our faces. Prince Adonai! I had turned and bowed, the very action a jest, my smile of the kind that hurt. Eminence of the Gods!
I have replayed this memory a hundred thousand times. If it was written, its pages would be worn down to papyrus shreds, dogeared to an honorable death. It had kept me company as I collected my father's ashes from his funeral pyre. It had visited me like a lover when I had been knocked into a sleep that, instead of ending, had left its shoes at the door and turned me into a caged canary.
I like to imagine that my first word, when I chewed through the bars of that cage, (when I awoke), was: “how long?”
And I like to imagine, that the nurse who had fallen out of her seat in shock at my voice, had risen with this answer on her breath: “Three days, my prince. You were out three days.”
-----
If Vercingtorix had asked it of me — what changed? — I would have plucked the memory of the teryr out of my head to place in his grasp. I would look up at him, a saint-pretender painted all in gold, and say:
Somewhere in my three month sleep, that cheering boy turned into metaphor and left me behind. I reach for him and he sidesteps me as if I were a ghost; perhaps less. I watch as he walks over to the dead teryr, places a kiss on its beak, rips his obsidian-tipped arrow out of its chest. He whispers, “I thank you for your sacrifice,” and I watch as brilliant exultation sharpens his eyes of dreaming silver.
“May you fly free beneath Solis's sun.”
-----
“What one views as apathy, another understands as composure.” He settles into the surf besides me; I turn and study his sun-drenched profile, the rigidity that refuses to leave his shoulders even when his eyes close, when his pulse steadies.
“I am not difficult to impress.” There is a white shell lying on its back between us. I pick it up, dust off the sand, raise it to catch the light. “Is that true?” I trace the perfect grooves pressed into the scallop's back in ever tightening circles. “That pleases me. Remain that way—” I say, the shell falling back to the sea, “—and soon, I think I will believe you.”
When I laugh again, I conduct it as brightly as if the last one hadn't been speared through by a fit of blood-choked coughs. As if everything to me, the exact moment it ends, is already forgotten.
It is a maddening way to live; he will tire of it soon.
I am tired of myself.
-----
“Damascus doesn’t mind,” he promises. I nod, intrigued by this bond that exists between them. What does it feel like? I would like to feel it for myself. Can he see everything his dragon sees? If he were mine, I would beg him to fly over all the land, every sunrise a different shore, and I would lay back in the sand and give myself over to his sight.
May you fly free beneath Solis's sun.
I lean back to stare mutely at the red horizon, my wings keeping me propped just above the water. My hair is long enough to skim the surf now, longer than I have ever allowed it to grow. I turn to him. “Damascus is more comfortable than a caravan,” I muse, reaching over to examine a stray lock of his hair.
I say no more about the oasis, about my need to see him again, and again, and again. I know he understands. (I hope he understands.) That to demonstrate such a need is something — the old me — the dead me — would compare to a knife between my ribs, placed there myself. My princely pride haunts me like a banshee; I allow it to. It is said that pride is a man's last refuge, both ruin and salvation. I have been prideful since childhood. As the first prince, I had thought of it as my right. Yet now, my older self wonders: what had I been chased from?
What had I been afraid of?
Instead of answering this, I turn to Vercingtorix, more interested in exorcising his demons than my own. (That old reliable princely pride.) I think of his scars. “Tell me of your mother. Was she kind?”
Is it bad not to miss mine?
-----
And then I recoil from him because I am a hypocrite. I know this, and yet feel no shame. He asked me, why do you not want to be saved? and my answer had exploded from me as fury masked as despair trying to be anything but hypocrisy.
I wish for death because I cannot have back what I have lost. I am mortally afraid of death yet because I know it will always remain just out of reach, just out of completion, I invoke it like Solis's name. Sand streams off my wings as I pace a frothing rut in the retreating tide. My sister's voice chimes like funeral bells in my head: The doctors keep saying that you are recovering. Recovering. Never recovered. I can’t say for sure why you’ve improved, or survived.
(Prince Adonai! Eminence of the Gods!) It is because I am Solis's own personal joke, dear sister.
“‘Let me not then die ingloriously and without struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.’”
My breath escapes me in white clouds. I do not trust myself to speak. Nothing about my expression betrays me — I am too well raised for that — yet I am standing on a precipice and do not know how to jump, nor how to retreat. I flinch when Vercingtorix stands, water raining off of him; I turn to him warily; wearily. There are a thousand things I can say. That he does not understand. That I have always hated poetry. That I am sorry. That I am sorry.
That I wish I can hate him for giving me another thing to remember him by when he leaves.
“... choose something else. Become something different; something more ...”
I cough, yet the hoarseness does not clear from my voice. “I am not a saint,” I say softly. The ocean whispers its agreeance. “And I am running out of reasons to become — more.” This last is spoken for him; to him; at once accusatory and something so, so close to begging.
Give me a reason, Vercingtorix.
I bend down to retrieve my cloak.
“I have found something — I have found something, I think, that might save you.” I freeze; my cloak slips back to the sand. I have not had enough practice, yet, of hiding my shock. It is worn too openly, and if I could see myself, it would trouble me. “What? The best of our House has searched, Torix, yet none have ever —”
“Do you trust me?” Embers of dying sun glance off of his eyes. I am struck silent for a full heartbeat. Inexplicably, I think of my brother. Of his scales, his smile, the wineglass. I had trusted him.
So how could I not trust you?
I suppress a shiver, when, cloak-less, a whistling gale chills me down to my bones. I nod.
We are not what we say; we are not the scenic lovers we portray, leaning together in the sun-warmed sea. I do not believe him a fool, ignorant to the threads we weave beneath our declarations of affection and half-truths. This, I think, epitomizes the complexity of any affection; in that even as we are ingenuine, we are not ingenuine.
I know nothing of him. Nothing. To me, he remains the sick prince in a field of desert sage. To me, he remains immortalized by a well, drying in the Solterran sun. A pretense of health, and valor, and speaking to me of his life as if it were a fairytale. I have thought of Pilate, when I met him at the party, as small. And yet, Adonai as he stares at the sea represents, in my mind’s eye, an enormity of being that I might never reach. Suffering, I think, will always be beautiful to me—in that I do not know who I am, or how to love, without an undercurrent of misery.
Perhaps it can all be surmised in the way we look at the ocean. In the way, for Adonai, the sea represents something virginal, something new, and for me—it represents everything I suppress; the sins I hide from; the undoing of myself. It has made me; but for Adonai, it only becomes a stone etched with my name.
I wish I were a better man.
I wish it more than almost anything, when I hear him say: Is that true? That pleases me. Remain that way—and soon, I think I will believe you. We dance around our lack of permanence; but I watch as he raises the shell, and smile a soft, private sort of smile. “Tell me, Adonai. What do you believe death is?”
I am not tired of him.
I am not tired of him, because I have died in every way a man can, save physically. I ask, “Does it scare you?”
Because we already weave our way in and out of our mortality; we speak in the same ever tightening rings he traces upon the shells callous skin. Damascus is more comfortable than a caravan, he says, and I turn to press my face into his touch against my hair.
Tell me of your mother. Was she kind?
I close my eyes. The sea, here, sounds like the sea did from my bedroom window as a boy: nearly gentle. “No. No one where I am from is kind.” I open them, to find his. I admit, “She had wished I would be a girl. To spite my father, I think; she never wanted to send a son to war. But she knew me better than anyone else,” I muse. “She knew my nature.”
I cannot understand the strange parallel that exists between this moment, and that sentence, and what Orestes had once told Boudika in a prison cell. It is in your nature.
I have never believed is omnipotent in our destinies; drivers at the helm of fate. I have never believed us to have that sort of control, simply because we will never be able to change our origin. We are born who we are born, and this I nearly say now: that, whatever nature exists inherently within us, we cannot escape.
We cannot resist those tendencies for long; and so, perhaps if I had known what Adonai had thought, the memory he wrapped in his mind in delicate gold ribbon, I might say: for our entire lives, we are only striving toward what we are right now, toward this moment—
Within the Adonai who slew the teryr, there would forever be the Adonai with indigo eyes and a sickness that smelled like honeyed milk. He recoils, but I do not allow him; I press forward, ever forward, for if I can see—or feel—his pain rather than my own I feel, for a moment, reprieved.
(Because the noble boy who bled and fought upon the black beaches of a small island—that Torix, his entire life, was destined only to become this. A man with a black pit for a heart. A man who would forever hurt the thing he loved, betray it, cut out its heart and carve his name upon the flesh—)
I am not a saint, says Adonai. I am not a saint .
“You are closer to one than I am,” I say, to lighten the severity of our conversation. The jest does not belong in this moment, in this time; but we dance the edge of becoming too deeply entangled in the threads we weave, in the dance we dance.
“Would you like me to give you reasons?” I ask. My voice, to my own ears, sounds incessant. It is the same voice I used for Bondike, the night before he told me the truth. It is the same voice I used with Dagda, when I lost myself in him and his kindness.
It is the same voice I use now; not because I hope to save him, but because I hope to condemn myself. “Let me show you."
Damascus has been listening, all along. He raises his tremendous head now, and behind us his eyes align with where we rest, huge and opalescent. I nearly say, they could take us anywhere. I have not yet told Adonai of my Bonded’s snake-like charm; nor the hallucinogenic poison that drips so readily from his serrated, serpentine fangs.
I don’t think I ever well; but even so, the gravity of his gaze is as telling, and pulling, as the sea at our heels. Damascus presses forward, surprisingly supple for his size. He has, held gently in his mouth, a glass vial. And in the glass vial, there is a substance that looks like liquified starlight.
I grasp it in my telekinesis and pull it forward. I understand his incredulity; the idea that the family physicians had searched, and searched, to no avail. They never found the answer, I am certain, because they were afraid to. I hand him the magic blood under a guise of nonchalance; the exact kind of feigned nonchalance that begs—no, demands—that no questions are asked. I hand him the blood and pretend I do not hear the star-pegasus' screams of pain, or the way her freedom shattered so easily. That rebel's spirit crushed, all for this opportunity.
“Let me give you a reason,” I repeat, more forcefully. Damascus has withdrawn, back to the edge of the trees; but I step forward, into the space where I can smell both the colognes he uses to hide the smell of blood, and the iron-sharp scent of it on his breath. “Let me take you to every ocean on the continent, to sights you have never seen. Let me—“
I do not finish, because the words I wish to say taste poisonous on my tongue. Let me save you. Instead, where I cannot speak, I show. I kiss first his shoulder, then his neck; then my breath ghosts along the tender, beating vein in his throat until, at last, my lips caress the small, soft space between jaw and jugular. I am touching him without touching him; the fine hairs of his cheek tickle my lips. In that moment, my breath (in one long inhale) fills with nothing save Adonai, Adonai, Adonai.
My eyes closed, I remind myself I have never boasted a complex of heroism; only that of duty. My father would disagree; he would say I had been conceived to be a hero, that he brought me to this earth for no other purpose.
But hero—and this, I think, is reflected in the drastic intensity of my eyes when they reopen—can mean anything that culture demands. Hero can be a man who jumps from a cliffside to imprison a gentle soul. Hero can mean a man who betrays his deepest love, for a matter of pride and properness. Hero can mean ribbons and regalia; brass medals that shine upon broad, vibrant chests.
Hero, in a different slant of right, can mean villain. On the other side of history.
(In the shadows of my half-truths, my almost-lies).
In the way I want both to cradle and crush Adonai, in all his difference, in all his tenderness, in all his tragedy.
I think, in that moment, I want to love him not in spite of his brokenness, but because he is broken. Because I cannot hurt a thing already dying. Because, in my own sick way, allowing him to become a martyr in my story means I will not force him to sacrifice anything for me.
“Adonai,” I say, softly. My voice is as gentle as the waves on the sand. The vial gleams like a glass full of moonlight between us, strange, surreal. “No one—not even the best of us, the best we can imagine—makes it out of this story the same man we came into it.” I want to say, none of us make it out alive.
But this, we know. The scar over my eye; the honey-sweet smell of sickness on his breath. No, I think.
This is only a delay. A light in the dark, brief, ephemeral, waiting to be snuffed out even as we feed the flame. But let me, Adonai. Let me feed it.
