He was meant to be in hiding. The sand clung to him like a shroud, driving him home. The land of his mother turned land of his crimes. All this world offered was gore and suffering and Juniper. Hard tawny grains whipped against his legs in a fierce wind and he wondered if this was the place of his birth. Cursed be the day.
Cursed be the day that a figure would rise on the horizon, glittering in the sun more than even the black bull-king. Exiled, condemned, and sought for execution, he watched the stranger crest a dune and thought, Perhaps today it will end for me.
Perhaps that would be alright.
@Orestes | Search and Destroy ”in blood the blade, to its golden hilt, I’ll drown,“ I pledge you now, to death they all are bound,
Orestes closes his eyes against the flurry of sand whipped into his face.
Today, the desert is discontent. It does not want him in it. It does not want anyone in it.
He feels like a trespasser in his own land. The sun bakes him. The heat comes off the earth in transparent waves.
And yet—each brusque touch of autumn wind chills him to the bone. Perhaps it is not only that. Perhaps it is something else,
such as the way the sun does not quite warm his flesh, and the blue above him is so bright it is condemning. Perhaps it is the way the angry whispers of the sand seem accusatory; enflamed; if he stands too long in one place, they shift over-foot, they lash his legs, they pull at him. As if ready to bury him alive.
An angry desert.
He thinks for a moment that other gods show their discontent with the mortal realm through disappearance or apathy. But Solis shows it with his brilliant present; he shows it in the way he burns as Orestes crests a dune, glowing and confused, looking this way and that.
That is when he sees the bull. In other light, the pure black colour of the silhouette would have been ominous. But here, in the desert, it cannot withstand the assault of sunshine and gold.
Orestes runs. The wind buffets his face; the figure dips from his vision as he slides down the dune and up the opposite side, again and again, until only one valley of sand separates them. He says, “El Rey.”
The executioner.
REMEMBER ICARUS FOR HIS FLIGHT, NOT HIS FALL. REMEMBER HIM AS THE BOY WHO TOUCHED THE SUN.
A bull, white or black, in this way they are the same.
He is golden, this man, this foolish person who would come running and, laying his neck beneath the guillotine say, ”El Rey,” the name of his executioner.
”Yes,” he says, because what else is there to say? What more could come from his mouth but that which he wonders: ”Have you come for your death? I do not know you, as you must know me.” El Rey surveys him again; he would meld with the sand had it not been so vicious on the wind. ”There are easier ways to die than by my horns, stranger.” It was true. And he did not know if today would be his end or the man’s, but he had decided it must be somebody’s, because what sort of meeting was this but a final one? El Rey had come looking for danger, for trouble, even as he left that sweetest girl behind for a visit to Solterra. I can still visit my home, it said, The rumors are false; I am not exiled. I have simply chosen to be with you.
But what she believed would not matter, in the end, if he were dead. So he readied himself for war.
@Orestes ”in blood the blade, to its golden hilt, I’ll drown,“ I pledge you now, to death they all are bound,
