the great object of life is sensation - to feel that we exist, even though in pain
♠︎ ♕ ♠︎
He comes at dusk, just as supper is being laid out in the square, a feast for nobles and priestesses and peasants alike. Soon they’ll serve the wine, the deep and supple reds that Denocte is known for, and the sunlight-gold varieties of the desert. There is a clarity to the air that is just this side of a chill, and the new night smells of smoke and cinnamon.
But August bypasses the tables groaning beneath the wait of serving baskets. He spares only a glance for the crowd, firelight and the last rays of the sun gleaming on his golden coat, casting him in red and bronze. There is laughter coming from the throng, and somewhere two fiddlers are warming up, racing one another up the frets. All of it makes him smile, and if he were a more sentimental or older man his heart might ache with it; but he is not, and so he simple goes on, turning down the street that has transformed into a memorial for the dead.
The stallion is far from the only one here, but the crowd is thinner that it would be later, which is what he’d been counting on. A gypsy mare picks out soft notes from her guitar and the dark filly beside her sings in a tongue August can’t name, but that still sends a shiver wending down from between his shoulders. The music sounds the way the trail of moonlight looks riding the ripples of a stone tossed in a pool.
There are so many altars. Some are for individuals: August pauses for a moment at a table for Acton, slain a year ago, and considers a carving of the man through serious silver eyes. The space is bright with flowers, waxy and sooty from dozens of candles. There are loose matches and playing-cards. Settling his weight back, August withdraws a deck from the satchel he carries, and shuffles through it until he comes to the queen of hearts. He lays it at the base of a thick white candle, but whether it’s for the memory of the man who died protecting their queen or the golden woman he left behind, the palomino isn’t sure.
He passes one for Raum, one for those missing from the island - namely Asterion and his sister - one for the victims of the tidal wave and thunderbirds and all the wrath of the gods. And then he comes, at last, to a long table stacked with little candles, as in a church. Some are lit and flickering, most are still dark, and there are tokens strewn across the table, laid carefully at the base of the candles: feathers and coins, notes and gleaming stones.
August lifts a wooden taper, carefully lighting the end in a bowl of silently flickering fire is he certain is enchanted. He lights two candles, plain white wax, and bows his head. For a few moments he merely stands with his eyes closed, listening to the soft whisper of the flames, and imagines the smoke drifting on and on until it reaches his parents, in their kingdom of the dead. Strange to think that, if there is an afterlife, to them it’s he that is the ghost.
He turns away when he hears the footsteps of another approaching, and his face is smoothly composed. But there is still something faraway in his gaze when it slides to them.
“Need this?” he asks softly, and offers the still-burning taper.
we're all just searching for something bigger than we're all able to find
The court is full to the brim with equines from all over Novus and Antiope is brushed and bumped and pushed as the crowd swallows her into it as though it is a living, breathing thing with a mind of its own. She has not slept, again. Restlessness is in her bones, like the lioness that tracks a path back and forth and up and down her veins.
She needs to get away from the crowds before her magic does something she will regret.
Antiope has never regretted the use of her magic before, has never thought for a second about the repercussions of its lustful hunger, but she does know that she doesn’t want to hurt these horses. She has not come here to hurt, and the tigress’ magic is getting stronger. Just earlier she was out by the maze and, when she attempted to bolster her energy one of the corn stalks began to die. Antiope is a god-thing with greedy magic, made to destroy even as it aids.
There is no telling what it can do to someone else, if anything, but the woman doesn’t want to risk it. She pushes her way through the crowd, brushing tense shoulders against sides and chests. Something hard and sharp jabs her in the ribs, but she doesn’t stop to see what it is, only grits her teeth and squeezes through and opening ahead, where the gathering seems to have dwindled down.
She finds herself standing before the altars, lit mostly with candles and decorated with all manner of gifts and offerings. Antiope doesn’t recognize the faces of the equines whose portraits have been added to some of the individual shrines, but it is clear from the items strewn at their places that many of them were well loved and greatly missed.
There are so many, she stops trying to figure out who they were and what lives they led halfway through the collection of tables and other set ups. It makes her wonder whether such celebrations were arranged in her old world, for all the lives that had been lost in needless war. Those altars would have covered a battlefield.
Antiope wonders if any would have been made for the gods.
She stops at the table full of nameless, faceless candles, where the champagne colored man stands in the firelight and shadows with hair silver like his eyes. Although he doesn’t look familiar, her sapphire eyes slip to the tattoo on his shoulder and Antiope knows he must be connected in some way with Aghavni. Curious.
He seems to hear her approach, turning toward her to offer a lit taper. “I, ah-” she wants to say no, and I’m just passing through, but when she sees the distant look in his eyes she stops. And she takes it, slowly, from his grasp, but hangs onto it a little too tightly, “Thank you.” Antiope’s gaze shifts back to the table, covered in small candles and other trinkets.
Her instinct is not to light anything. To let the taper burn away to nothing more than ash and smoke on the wind and keep them close and tight to her heart. But then she remembers the night on the beach, when the sea had tried to swallow her, and Isra had come with rubies at her feet and she had finally spoken of them.
She tips the flickering, wavering, lit end of the taper out toward two of the candles and, after a moment’s hesitation, after a breath she holds a little too long, lights them. The wooden stick burns down and down and down, until she places it within a cup of sorts no doubt filled with some sort of extinguishing liquid.
Should she say something? Antiope looks at the two candles, one a little taller than the other, and images two pairs of verdant, forest green eyes. Perhaps she should just leave. They are not here, there is nothing of them here but the memories of them she has always carried, and the pain that comes with them. A short, sharp breath escapes her.
the great object of life is sensation - to feel that we exist, even though in pain
♠︎ ♕ ♠︎
If he is surprised to find himself face-to-face with they city’s new regent, August doesn’t show it. Instead he only steps back once she accepts the taper, wordless but watching as her gaze turns away. He wonders who those slim white candles represent: parents? Siblings? Friends or lovers or comrades, war or sickness? There have been many opportunities for loss in Novus of late. It is what marks them all as equals.
When she begins to light them he averts his eyes, watching others make their remembrances, some laughing and light, others somber. If he listens carefully, and when the music drops low, he can hear the drip of wax on the altars.
It is difficult not to wonder how closely they all came to winding up here, hunting that damned Relic. After the stories of all the deaths, he is still half-amazed that he and his loved ones emerged whole, and it makes his opinion of Novus’s gods no less murky than it had already been. And he - golden boy, who could wear a role as easily as a mask, capable and confident - had been found wanting. August hadn’t set out desiring the Relic, but now that it had been given to someone else (who?) it seems to sit at the corner of his thoughts the way it had the island.
It’s hard, then, not to think of collapse.
Her exhale brings him back. His silver-moon eyes shift to the regent again, smoke still drifting around her; she looks like an idol herself, foreign and sharp, something to pray to. August wonders what kind of prayers.
But though her eyes are sapphire-bright and her bones carved sharp and elegant and her hair falls in waves to the cobblestones she is still a woman here to remember those lost, and before he can decide better of it he reaches to touch her shoulder with the soft velvet of his nose. The gesture is brief, gentle, almost intimately so - as though she is Anghavni or Minya and not a stranger.
Then he’s leaning away, back into the smoke and starlight, his gaze still on her. “Can I buy you a drink, Regent?” August says softly. “To toast their memory.” And it isn’t clear whether he means those two flickering tapers, or the two before them, or every ghost that filled Denocte tonight.
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