[AW] nothing gold can stay

[Orestes]

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 

"SO DAWN

GOES DOWN TO

DAY, NOTHING

GOLD CAN

STAY"

CREDITS

[Marisol]

"And when I touch you in each of the places we meet in all of the lives we are, it’s with hands that are dying and resurrected. When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life, in each place and forever."

The girl with snow-white hair comes to visit me every morning. I forget her name, but not her face; we eat breakfast together every day, and a painting of her hangs in my kitchen. I am always curious about the signature in the corner, which I can never quite read clearly. It is a very good painting. It looks just like her: so much like her, in fact that sometimes when I wake up I wonder if it isn’t a window through which she’s staring at me, or an enchanted paper rather than a real work of art. She has bright amber eyes that remind me of an owl’s. Her face is mottled in gray and deep brown. Her lips are coated in black. 

But it is her hair I always think of first—long, snow-white hair, tied up in gold ribbons, twisted into careful plaits—because it is the last thing to leave when she closes the front door behind her.

Sometimes she brings another girl with her. A tan one with bright blue eyes and wings where her ears should be. This one is good at smiling, good at being chipper, but I don’t think I know her as well. Today is not one of those times. 

It must be summer; light leaks in through the windows. Dust swirls in the air. My bed is unmade. We take our spots at the table. She sits across from me, and I can see the sunlight caught in her eyelashes; the glint of sharp teeth in her half-open mouth; the strands of hair, pale as seashells, that drift around her face.

“…Mom,” she says softly. She almost sounds afraid.

“Do you remember—“

---

He falls asleep with his face in my hair. I have been bad at cutting it lately, and I think this has something to do with it. I would like to make my husband’s life as soft as possible. He had mentioned once—it was not even a real complaint—that the way I had cut it made it grow out spiny, that it would scratch his cheek sometimes in sleep, and now I cannot bring myself to cut it again, not as long as he is here with me.

Everyone else is asleep, but I cannot close my eyes. This is when the panic hits me. The blood-freezing fear. I look at my family, dozing here perfectly still, doused in moonlight, and instead of feeling peaceful, or soothed at the sight of it, I am stricken with a fear so deep I can’t even breathe. 

My chest seizes. I try not to gasp; I know it would wake them up. But to be alive is painful. I feel a burn at the edges of my eyes. Tears threaten me with a silent sting. Acid climbs up into my throat as the feeling surges past the place it should sit in my stomach, and when I breathe it is less an inhale than a stutter, caught in four or five different places before I manage to pull it in fully.

He stirs; I go deer-still. I feel the soft whoosh of his exhale stirring my hair, the flutter of his lashes pressed up against my shoulder. The warmth of his body, still spilling out today’s store of sunlight. 

But he is still asleep. 

I am almost asleep, too, by the time hours later when I hear him whisper: I must go home.

---

I try not to think about it. We plant apple seeds in a new square around the orchard, Hilde and Aeneas trailing behind us and bickering, hitting each other with their still-soft wings. 

I watch him out of the corner of my eye. He walks just beside me, shoulder to shoulder, like we did that last time so many months ago. Today the light is thin and gray. The sun has been suffused through miles of rainclouds before it reaches us, tiny specks on a huge earth. It’s not quite cold yet, but winter is threatening us, peering over the horizon of this silty sky. I don’t want things to change. I want it to be fall forever.

The air smells like rain; underfoot the soil is still damp, and the petrichor mixes with the smell of crushed leaves. We say nothing. What is there to say?

Behind me, Hilde laughs, clear and bright as a bell.

I kiss his cheek. I think we both smile. 

---

He stays with us most of the time. But he is still king, and there are still things to be taken care of in the desert, and today he has left after breakfast to go check on things, saying to the kids conspiratorially that they must take care of me, and telling me, with his eyes, that he will be back soon enough.

The second he’s out of sight, gone through the gates of the city, I bolt upstairs. My throat is too dry to swallow against. I breeze past all the servants, the guards, the housekeepers, and into the little office he has set up inside our castle. I am a maniac. I rifle through books; I tear open letters. I pull out every drawer in the desk. Candle flames stutter, threatening to blow out. The other guests must be able to hear the clattering, but I don’t care. 

My body is gone. All that’s left is panic.

I find it tucked in a notebook whose pages have been warped and stained by water. Has it been two years? I read my own letter, the ink half as black as it used to be. All this to say: if there is a day you need to come home, Terrastella’s shores are open.

I hate myself for writing it.

---

“Mom,” she says softly. She almost sounds afraid. The air is thinned by sunlight, by silence, by plumes of pale dust. Breakfast sits between us, untouched. “Do you remember—“

“Always,” I murmur. 

We eat.

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