i'm tired of the weight of mortality. i want to tear it from my bones until i bleed silver and gold.
“A
udierunt autem umbrae.”
He no longer shivers when the shadow cloak’s familiar chill soaks into his skin, sinks into the notches of his spine. He has invoked it so many times, on so many moons, that without its coldness the desert night embraces him in a pocket of sizzling heat, sweat-sheen slicking his midnight pelt.
The limited visibility, however — that, Caine is still not used to enough. The shadows he wears drinks the light out from the dark, and when the night is dark enough, the boy sees about as well as a blind man on a good day.
He’s picked up enough tricks from his nights under the shadows to elevate his vision to that of a semi-blind man on a very good day, and Caine deems the improvement passable. He dabbles in stealth, after all, and going unseen is more useful a talent to him than seeing where his dagger should slice.
Without the cloak, the plan he is executing tonight would never have come into fruition.
- ♦︎ -
After he had sworn his blade to Fia, Caine returned from the hideout deep in the canyons of the Elatus and spent the better part of a month doing little more than observe Solterra and the suffering of her people with cold, keen eyes.
A month counting the ribs of passing children, their smiles too big for their hollow faces, when the rationing began in earnest. A month swatting away the flies descending in swarms upon the corpses of skeleton-thin newborns, wasted-away elderly, left in the dark of the alleys.
He watched and he watched, and one day, he flipped a coin.
A game he used to play back when he was a younger boy with a sharper knife, blood trailing him instead of shadows. When he could not reach a decision — to spare them, or not — he flipped a coin.
The question had now become: to save them, or not.
Heads, and he would continue as he always has. Watching and waiting and watching. For Fia to send her letters, for food to become scarcer and scarcer, for flies to feast and swarm.
Tails, and he would enter the ivory citadel and begin a game he didn't know if he could win.
The coin came up tails. The game had begun, and the clock was already ticking.
- ♦︎ -
Slipping past the line of velvet-suited guards is childsplay. The Sun Court’s limestone castle practically swims in shadow, and the irony is not lost on Caine.
He tucks himself behind a pillar in an empty corridor, and pulls out a map. An ocean of moving dots covers the worn yellow parchment when he rolls it out carefully, like ants on stale bread. (The rations have starved even ants.)
One for every citizen of Solterra, he knows; but the enchanted map is peculiar. It reveals one name at a time, and only if you know of its bearer. Caine closes his eyes and pictures the curl of an R and the silver of a ghost.
Raum. He is comforted somewhat when he sees that the dot has not moved since the last time he had checked. The blood king (a title some have bestowed on him, for the blood on his coat during his coronation and for the lives he has already reaped) is still in his study.
And from Caine’s observations of him over the past week, when the clock strikes midnight, he will retire to his chambers.
It is ten minutes to midnight. Caine wraps the shadows tighter around him, slides the rolled up map into a crevice he’d found in the pillar, and makes for the king’s chambers.
- ♞ -
“Ego liberabit vos.” The shadows slide from his skin and melt into the corners of the room, and already the heat they leave him in begins to feel unbearable.
He shoves the cloak into a satchel slung across his chest, and strides to Raum’s desk. Three minutes to midnight.
He has thought about the precise way he should startle, how much surprise he should reveal when Raum enters the room, for days and days. Imitation has always been the boy’s art, but he had never considered learning how to startle. Some would say it came naturally.
Before he can mull it over further, he grabs an official-looking scroll off the desk and stuffs it into his bag, before rifling carefully through a stack of sealed envelopes. One minute to midnight.
He stops pondering how to appear startled. He tells himself that tonight is just like all other nights. Just another nobleman’s chambers. Just another job.
The more he believes it, the more genuine he will seem when he is proven so, so wrong.
@Raum | "speaks" | notes: hope this works as a starter for them!
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
The Blood King.
If Raum is aware that is what they call him, he does not let it be known. Neither does the mercurial crow let it sway him from his deeds. Flowing from him is a river of blood indeed. His sins are vast and judgement, he feels, presses closer upon his flesh each day. She comes with wicked teeth and claws. She is the predator he cannot slip and death has marked him out as prey – just as it has with everyone else Raum shares breath with. Who is he, judgment asks, to decide to bring them to death at a time of his choosing? It is not his right.
Yet here is Raum and beneath his feet he builds a road of shattered bone and glues it together with blood. He is the monster that should not have a crown, not when his people thirst and hunger and destitution prowls rabid through his dirty, cobbled streets.
Raum is no king of excess. He does not indulge himself when the doors of the citadel close behind him. His blood does not know rich liquor nor his flesh the attention of women. No, Raum is focused and quiet and… predictable.
He moves through the halls as he does each night. Moving from his throne to his study and each night he wonders and waits. Never be predictable a thief might whisper in warning for then they know just when to strike. Raum was a pickpocket of Denocte’s streets. He was silent and deadly and little more than a phantom as he stole from his victims trinkets and jewels, money and, eventually, lives. The boy would watch, wait for tells upon his prey, wait for a pattern of behavior to emerge. You see, Caine’s game was Raum’s long before Caine ever arrived in Denocte. Then he was a spy in Solterra’s dust bowl and he knows never to be predictable. Except when he wants to be.
Raum has been waiting, he has walked the shadowed halls each night waiting to see if he has acquired a scout to watch his every move. He waits for the spy to come requesting his death with a weapon in their grasp. So the Crow is not surprised when the darkness laughs and shifts and draws back. From it Caine appears, stood at his desk.
The door had opened like a mere whisper and the king had not breached its threshold. Rather he stands, swathed in shadow, and watches the Denoctian man in silence. Somewhere a midnight bell begins to toll and Raum’s eyes gleam blue, blue, blue.
our names won't be remembered if we die like trampled flowers
C
aine cannot pinpoint the exact moment he knows that he is standing on a knife’s edge. Only that he does, and that he is.
Raum knows. Somehow, he knows.
He does not enter the room. Instead, the silver king is as pale as a specter as he lingers, statuesque, in the dark of the open door. For a moment Caine simply pauses, not looking up from the letters splayed on the desk, not looking down at the dagger sheathed by his shoulder.
So this king is not so easy to deceive as his preening nobles had been. Caine had planned for such a possibility, of course — he would have been the fool if he had not dug all he could have into Raum’s past, before encroaching in his very chambers.
He knows of the orphan who had crept the Denoctian streets, picking pockets and slicing necks. He knows of the Crow who had loved Rhoswen, the Crow who had loved Acton, the ex-Crow who had killed, either directly or indirectly, both of them.
Caine also knows, more than anything else, that this night could very well end with his neck in a noose — or, incomparably worse, with Fia’s rebellion known. He had not told her. He had not told her, because one of Agenor's first lessons had been: secrets only live if the ones who hear of it are dead.
He could surely die, but he would do so with the first and last attempt he’d ever made at honor — unsullied.
So he thinks of Fia and he thinks of starving Solterra, and he tries not to think of all he has put at stake. He breathes out, evenly, and summons every last shred of shrewdness Agenor has ever taught him to wield, before he turns light and sly and expecting (startling had been a calculated miscalculation he sweeps quickly under the rug) towards the ghost by the door.
It is not the first time he has played this game, Caine reminds himself. He has not even shown his hand.
“You are very punctual, King Raum,” he says, mildly. Shadows play with matches across his eyes and smile, but Raum is too far away to see. “It has made it easy for me to track you.” Too easy. Realization sets in like a swarm of locusts, but Caine does not stir from his vigil by the man's desk. He will not move until Raum does him the honor first.
“I was sent by a noble who wants you dead. One of many.” Caine’s tongue glides smoothly over his words, as a tongue can only sincerely do when it knows it bears the truth. In the months since Raum’s coronation, he has received letter after letter from nobleman after nobleman, offering him fifty, seventy, a hundred gold pieces for the blood king’s silver head delivered on a silver plate.
“By his words, you offend his house’s ideals of what the Solterran monarchy should be. Even Seraphina,” he speaks the late queen’s name with a touch of hesitation, “had been better fit to rule, because at least her blood had run Solterran.”
So far, Caine has spoken nothing but what Raum presumably must know for himself. The silver king may have been anointed with enough blood for a reckoning, but he is a solitary monster in a den of blood-drinking beasts.
All waiting, waiting, waiting, for the chance to lay their siege.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
The doorway yawns above him, its maw black, its wooden lips limned in moonlight. He watches as Caine gazes at the papers. Did Raum possess any more secrets than the horror already being enacted upon Solterra’s dusty streets? And even if he did, was Raum enough of a fool to leave them exposed upon the table?
Eventually Caine moves and Raum’s eyes (that glow like blue torches in the doorway) follow him. The Denoctian turns and he turns and then he stops. Caine’s silver eyes meet the blue of an ocean – he becomes an iceburg upon the water. Caine is fire and ice but Raum is the lethal spark of electricity and he will never fail to wield that ice and fire to his advantage.
No surprise glimmers in Caine’s gaze yet Raum’s sharpens like a blade in its absence. Each touch of his watching is a pinprick of electricity. Static fizzles beneath his skin, it burns like water through the electric of his nerves.
You are punctual… it has made it easy to track you. Though he does not smile, though he does not laugh, his eyes gleam. Bright, bright, bright, cold like a blade pressed to the throat. His gaze mocks, gently, subtly. He watches realization dawn and wash across Caine’s face. It passes in the blink of an eye and Caine stays behind Raum’s desk. He hangs like a shadow there, a reaper – oh, is he here to bring death upon the Solterran king?
Raum does not stir from where he stands, languid, in the doorway. He listens as Caine speaks of a plot to kill him. But Raum knows this, it is why he changes his skin like a chameleons and wanders whilst doppelgangers roam in his place. Yet this night, he is no doppelganger, he wears no skin but his own, he stands with no guards here to protect him. Oh, it is just he and Caine and who might come out of this victorious?
“I could not agree with your noble more.” He says at last and moves pouring like quicksilver from that gaping black maw. “Drink?” He asks softly, as if Caine’s threat of death was something unremarkable. He fills a crystal glass with whiskey and slides it across the table. It gleams darkly golden in the light, amber and rich. Never has a drop of alcohol passed Raum’s lips – Caine would know and so there is no surprise when the Villain king does not pour a second. “It is not poisoned.”
He does not move from the drinks cabinet, but regards Caine from where the moonlight streams in the window. Papers glow like slabs of marble and Raum muses softly, “So, Caine, are you here to kill me, or have you found enough to satisfy your curiosity?”
![[Image: x341oLX.png]](https://i.imgur.com/x341oLX.png)
