BE PATIENT TOWARD ALL THAT IS UNSOLVED IN YOUR HEART
TRY TO LOVE THE QUESTIONS THEMSELVES, LIKED LOCKED ROOMS OR BOOKS WRITTEN IN A VERY FOREIGN TONGUE
The glen is silent.
The valley itself is slender; the sun streaks across the snow covered earth in a jagged line.The light just barely crests the trees. Each side of the glen is barricaded by tall, arching evergreens and pines; they are solid white, covered in ice and snow. The wind does not reach the lower valley, but blows the frost from the branches in fine, fine dust. It drifts so slowly in the air it seems suspended, catching the sunlight in minuscule, orbital spirals.
A herd of elk move slowly through the distant trees. A bull raises his head and the light catches on his antlers, which are burnished the colour of bullion bricks. However, they are not so bright as the stallion that passes from the shadows of the pines into the light of the glen. The elk bellows and the clear, piercing sound echoes in the silent morning air.
Orestes is squinting at the sky when he breaks the pristine surface of the virgin snow—he is squinting as he enters the valley from a downward facing slope and takes in a sight he has never seen. Orestes had only experienced snow a handful of times in his life, and never to this extremity. His breath rushes out, a whoof, whoof, whoof that forms semi-opaque clouds. He hears a musical, crystalline tinkle of water and follows the sound until he comes upon a slender stream, cutting through the snow.
Snow was never Avdotya’s cup of tea - in fact, there is little in this world that truly is, but among it all it is the icy touch of winter that seems to grate against her tolerance with magnificent ease. She can feel regret as it rattles her frozen bones with every frigid footfall and there is a look of utter disdain painted ever-so perfectly across the sharp edges of her face; what a waste, she thinks, for her time is lost to curiosity’s fruitless hold.
But is it really so unavailing?
Somewhere beyond the trees comes a haunting cry, one that draws the mare to a stop. It’s a sound she doesn’t recognize from a beast that is foreign to her desert mind, yet it somehow pulls her deeper into the white-washed forest until she is upon the glen at its sunlit edges. She remains there, watching from the pines while a herd of antelope-like creatures (‘elk’ is no word to her) move steadily across the snow.
They are an intriguing sight, the animals, enough to briefly steal Avdotya’s attention away from her incessant brooding over this supposed wonderland... however, there is something- someone who catches her eye even more so than the beasts as they disappear into the trees. Opposite of where she stands cloaked in shadows is Solterra’s new king, emerging so fatefully into the clearing as if Solis had wrapped him up and set him down right before her.
And off he wanders, leaving a path for her to follow which she so readily does. The viper stalks him from a distance until he is stopped at the banks of a gently babbling brook, reveling in its seclusion from the world that bustled outside of this strange island. How unfortunate, then, that that world could so easily follow him, even among the nothingness there lingered the weight of duty.
Avdotya was more than happy to remind him of that. ”Is it heavy, the crown?” Her voice rolls from her tongue with a wisp of cold air, a simple murmur laced with pestilence and malignity; it reached out from her place behind Orestes and caressed him with gnarled fingers. Turn that painted cheek, dear king, she thought, let me learn the face of the man who has already stolen from me.
FIRE-LIT, HALF SILHOUETTE AND HALF MYTH, THE WOLF CIRCLES MY PAST, TREADING THE LEAVES INTO A BED TILL HE SLEEPS, BLACK SNOUT ON EXTENDED PAWS. BLACK SNOUT ON SULPHUR BODY, HE NUDGED HIS WAY INTO MY CONSCIOUSNESS. THERE IS NOTHING THAT WON'T BE LIT UP IN THE DARK TORCH OF HIS EYES.
Is it heavy, the crown?
Yes, yes, yes—
Orestes turns to face her.
She is there, dark and feral against the brilliance of the snow. Like a reckoning. The silence might remain aside from that malignant voice, but he is in no hurry to reply. An ear swivels to listen to the distant passage of those brilliant elk, the crunch of their hooves through the snow and underbrush, the musical cry of the brook.
Orestes says, “Yes.”
But duty should not be light.
Duty should not be a feather.
No; it will always be iron, or
gold, dense about the neck,
or the weight of the sea
when someone is sinking.
Orestes does not know her name, but he knows of her. The viper. A remnant of Zolin’s reign; a remnant of Solterra’s violent, turbulent past. Orestes does not doubt that out of all the Solterrans, they have the most in common.
We have survived genocide.
But he knows even more intrinsically that she must resent him, another monarch, another sovereign capable of atrocity. “Why did you not claim it?” Perhaps he feels resentment, too, although he cannot say why. Perhaps it is because she is at once a creature like him; and utterly foreign.
Orestes thinks in that moment his heart is cold enough to become a leviathan; a creature of the deep, the dark, of a world he’s forgetting. He almost remembers what it felt like to become a beast; a serpent; a monstrosity. Perhaps it is because he feels so far from the sun in that moment, but the golden glow of his tattoos bleeds from his skin like the light of a dying star. They become cool, silver, metallic.
In that moment, he realises why she unsettles him. In her eyes, he sees the expression of his own people; in her eyes, he can remember every failure he has ever made.
The pause between them seems to linger; it sits there heavy and cold, forcing the silence to grow so loud that Avdotya can hear even the softest rustle of fur from her bearskin in the biting winter winds. She knows his answer before he can say it, but that is only a shred of what she has come seeking. Who are you, Orestes? She wonders. Is he a Zolin, selfish and hungry for power? Is he Seraphina, righteous and dutiful? Or maybe he is the pale crow, Raum, driven only by a potent need to bury a nation under the hand of its own king. Again, the viper wonders: who are you? What mark will he leave on Solterra when his reign is all but gone.
A wry smile half-crooks itself upon her frosted lips when he asks her of the crown, why it was never hers when had once laid before her for the taking. The Davke manages a chuckle. ”Because I would never bleed for a people I do not care about.” There was not a single drop of blood coursing through her veins that was worth using for the sake of the Day Court or its citizens. No, Avdotya has only ever existed for her tribe, for her wild desert family decimated by a failed and unruly monarchy... to wear that crown atop her head would be to spit on the bones of all those Davke lost to it.
She steps closer to Orestes, her gaze unwavering as it traces every detail of his golden face. He looks every bit of the role he's taken up and it leaves a sour taste on her tongue. ”Solterra was not meant to be ruled by kings and queens and their pretty gold pieces,” she adds, her sharp desert accent as deep and bold as ever, ”it is a feral thing, a beast that cannot be tamed by your politics. There is a reason every bearer of that crown finds themselves dead.” Avdotya remembers Zolin and the way his throat spilled so beautifully upon the marble floor, how his cowardly, gurgling voice still begged for mercy while he lay dying. She bears her title as a kingslayer with particular pride - and there is little that holds her back from earning it a second time.
But this was no moment to slay. Jahin still remains in this man’s company as his regent, and for what reason she truly does not comprehend. It is that which drives her to seek more detail, more information. What is it about this foreign king that drove her own Davke to throw his loyalty to the wind and abandon them? Once more, Avdotya begins to wonder, but this time she questions whether Jahin was ever truly loyal to her at all.
FIRE-LIT, HALF SILHOUETTE AND HALF MYTH, THE WOLF CIRCLES MY PAST, TREADING THE LEAVES INTO A BED TILL HE SLEEPS, BLACK SNOUT ON EXTENDED PAWS. BLACK SNOUT ON SULPHUR BODY, HE NUDGED HIS WAY INTO MY CONSCIOUSNESS. THERE IS NOTHING THAT WON'T BE LIT UP IN THE DARK TORCH OF HIS EYES.
There is an alien aspect to their meeting; an otherworldly aura possesses the scene. Neither of them fit naturally in the glen; it is apparent in their lean frames, the colour of their eyes, the way that even here they smell of sand, salt, sweat.
Because I would never bleed for a people I do not care about. There is something about the brutality of it that strikes him; perhaps it is his bleeding heart. He remembers, briefly, his imprisonment. It feels as if it were lifetimes ago, but Boudika’s words come to him unbidden and surprised. “How do you not hate me? How do you care so deeply, even for your enemy? Even for your condemner?”
Orestes will never have an answer; not one that made sense. Perhaps it is the sea in him, capable of holding so many beasts and beings that are living and dying, always.
He says, “So it is better to let them fall under the hands of tyrants than take the burden of the crown?” Orestes’ voice is hard, for once—close to accusatory but not quite. It still borders on inquisitive.
Solterra was not meant to be ruled by kings and queens and their pretty gold pieces. It is a feral thing, a beast that cannot be tamed by your politics. There is a reason every bearer of the crown finds themselves dead.
Orestes cannot blame her. Her people are not dead yet; not completely; not like his. He smiles and it is a bitter thing, cold and edged as a blade. “The yoke is on the world, not just Solterra’s desert. There is nothing wild left.”
He thinks of his people, then; he thinks of how when the Oreszians dragged him through the streets to sentence him to death, they built a harbour, a dock, and ships with sails white as a dove’s pale wing. He thinks of how the gods are far, far away—even those that still live, like those in Novus. He thinks of the way those ships cut through the sea like so many whetted blades, taking distant islands, conquering more magic, seeking more, more, more. Always more.
“Do not accuse me of crimes that are not mine, Khan. I did not murder your people; and these politics are no more mine than they are yours. I did not let them build a citadel in your wild land, or hunt the old tribes to the brink.” He thinks of how, in another land, he had let it happen. He had let the freedom of his people slip through his grasp; if not in this life, then in another. Orestes has lost too many of his people's Souls. He thinks of how, in another land, a city on a black cliffside mocked everything he and his people had been.
Orestes sees in her everything he has lost; it breaks his heart. Her face is scarred, dark, with eyes that burn in a way that only the tormented understand. She reminds him tremendously of his Khashran, of his warriors, with their proud faces and their readiness to kill. Yet she is harder, perhaps, than they had ever been. There is no softness of the sea in her; no gentle shush, shush, shush of the waves, longing for the shore. She is everything he has learned of the desert. “I only want people to be as free as they can be. Men have died for less.” But rarely more.
The air is cold, cold, cold, and the magic of moments ago no longer exists. He takes his duty upon his shoulders once more, as Atlas would, and feels the heavy weight. Orestes does not mind being questioned; perhaps it is because he hopes that he can show her is no Zolin, no Raum, not even Seraphina. He is not Maxence, he is not Sol.
They are all dead. And he has inherited, instead, their broken kingdom.
“A burning lion sat me on the throne, and told me I was ash. I walked through the fire.” The line of his jaw is hard. It has begun to snow. “I will give Solterra everything I have and if one day that is my life, so be it.”
There is a momentary look of confusion that crosses her face when Orestes questions her. It wrinkles the corners of her eyes and pulls her lips into something of frown. Did he not hear her? Was she unclear when she said she did not care for the citizens of Day Court? ”Let me ask you then, Orestes: what sort of leader do you think I would be to a nation I hold no love for?” Her tone counters his, challenging him to tell her that she would be a fair and just ruler of the court; to tell her that she would not simply burn down what remained of the citadel and leave it for ash and dust. Tell me how much better this world would be with a viper at its helm.
It is not morality that guides Avdotya as it does most others. There is no empathy that resides within her bones, nor does she feel her heart shatter and break at the thought of others facing hardship. She was not raised to feel, she was raised simply to fight and survive. She is selfish, she cares only for what will improve her own interests. What those of the capitol are forced to endure does not and never will concern her.
Yet here stood the new king, trying to make a case.
Her scowl deepens. He does not know Solterra in the intimate ways the viper has come to learn throughout her life - indeed, it is not what it once was, but the desert winds are as wicked and voracious as they ever were. The people, her people, those who have refused to bow to the rule of kings and queens still remain... Orestes may not know it, he may not see it, but there is still a feral spark in their land that thrives within Avdotya and her Davke. She shakes her head just slightly. Let the man think it is all but extinct.
”I know exactly who is guilty of those crimes, Orestes, and while it may not have been you, they all sat upon the very same throne you now occupy. I have made the mistake of trusting a king and his word and I will not make it again.” Her ears fall flat and her eyes become alight with growing ire. She recalls the deal she made with Raum, that the Davke would not face the same torment inflicted upon those under the crow’s reign. They would have their desert, and in that regard he was honest and true - they roamed the Mors without question, but peril still found them. It wound its unending reach around them and tightened like a constrictor, choking the life out of them. She saw as they all grew gaunt and weary, she watched as numbers became thinner and thinner and she resented every moment of it because nothing could be done to save them.
So she laughs, she laughs when the king speaks of freedom. ”You say there is no wild left in the world. I say there is no freedom.” As long as there is a head to bear the crown, freedom is lost regardless of what promises he makes. Whether some strange burning lion sat him there or not, Avdotya sees no reason to change her outlook on the throne. Her hatred is too deeply rooted.
FIRE-LIT, HALF SILHOUETTE AND HALF MYTH, THE WOLF CIRCLES MY PAST, TREADING THE LEAVES INTO A BED TILL HE SLEEPS, BLACK SNOUT ON EXTENDED PAWS. BLACK SNOUT ON SULPHUR BODY, HE NUDGED HIS WAY INTO MY CONSCIOUSNESS. THERE IS NOTHING THAT WON'T BE LIT UP IN THE DARK TORCH OF HIS EYES.
Orestes admires her; he admires her fierce spirit, the way she contests him, as if he is naive. He admires the fact she reminds him so much of his own people. Orestes lets her believe it; besides, anything he said would not prove otherwise, and this he knows. He could tell her he knows more of “wildness” than any other Sovereign; but she would not believe him. Orestes could say that he knows more of “freedom” and the cost of it than even, perhaps, she. But he does not say those things. He measures her with his eyes. He listens quietly to her rage; the rage of the sea against the shore, against the cliffside, trying to wear at something that refuses to be worn.
He knows what it feels like to be betrayed by a god; and has she not been betrayed, as surely as she has been blessed?
“A leader who would be willing to do anything to preserve the people she loves; even if that meant heading a nation she hated.” It is not ideal, no. It is not what anyone would want to do; but it is certainly one way to stop genocide. Orestes understands there are more reasons for her to reject the throne than try to claim it; but one who lives as long in her positions as she has... Well, they possess a certain kind of cunning, of ambition.
I have made the mistake of trusting a king and his word and I will not make it again.
There is something winding within him; something sharp and feral. It belongs to an amorphous self; a form that would have taken her confrontation and become a beast. Orestes cocks his head at an angle; he narrows his eyes. The gesture is brief but predatory, and then gone. “I do not ask you to trust me on my word, Davke. I do not ask anything of you at all.”
I say there is no freedom.
It is Orestes’s turn to laugh. Oh, yes; there is something that builds him demand, steadfast, sure. There is something that builds in him as wild as the sea in a storm. “There has never been freedom. Not freedom as we would like it.” No. There is always bondage. There is always obligation. There are always pieces of ourselves we give away.
It is not a threat when she says then expect it to take your life.
For a moment, transient and strange, he thinks that to die on the Solterran throne would not be a poor fate. There are less noble ways to meet the end. “If it is not there, it would be somewhere else.”
Orestes’s eyes gleam, and they are full of mischief; of wildness. “What is your name, Davke? Should I expect you to come calling, the moment I step astray?” Orestes knows the answer to the question before he asks it. But he wants to hear her say it.
Then, his demeanour changes abruptly. His expression becomes hard; the mirth leaves his eyes. “What would you die for? Where do you see your Davke going in the war-torn desert kingdom?” He knows a survivalist when he sees one.
A leader who would be willing to do anything to preserve the people she loves. Indeed, she would—she has. Avdotya has spilled king’s-blood upon marble floor for them, she has lit the capitol in fire and blood for them with treason painted in red across her black hide. Her life belongs to the Davke and the desert they roam, but it does not belong to Day Court. ”And in heading that nation, I would end it.” Her voice is poison, it drips with a quiet venom that seeps into the frigid, winter air around them and promises him that there is no good hiding somewhere within her. Orestes, unfortunately, is trying in vain to create the image of a woman who does not exist.
And then she catches it, that flutter of a moment where the king’s face writhes just slightly with raptorial quality. A single, frayed string escaping from the clean edge of a fine silk piece and she cannot help but acknowledge the desire to pull at it, to perhaps unravel him from his poise. Her lip, now dressed in frost, twitches so softly even she fails to notice it. ”I did not need you to ask, your majesty.” The red heat of her eyes meet intently with the cool blue of his own, hoping that he’ll play her game.
Then finally she shrugs, for she grows tired of their back and forth on freedom and ferality. Or maybe because Orestes has actually said something she agrees with. Regardless, the conversation shifts and now he seeks her name, her motivation; whether she will uphold him in his actions or not. She intentionally avoids her name. ”My spear does not lose its thirst for the blood of kings, Orestes, but if you do not tread on me then I will not tread on you.”For now. Avdotya has spoken many a lie in her lifetime—most notably during her oath as regent—whether or not this is one of them even she doesn’t know.
Opportunity is a powerful thing, after all.
Her head then turns away from him, looking out past the babbling stream and into the wall of pines. ”You already know the answer to that.” The Davke, always the Davke. They met death for her once upon a time, when Zolin stole her away to leash and parade around like some prized hound (oh, how that worked out). They died for her and she intends to someday repay that debt, but she must first rebuild them to their former glory before that day ever comes. This, she knows, is why Solis granted her her immortality; it is why he spared her from the grizzly she now wears upon her back. ”We will find our place again. The effects of war stand poorly against time’s hand in the desert.” She is vague, and with reason. The Davke were a marauding group in their prime... she does not intend to change that if they are to flourish. ”Just as I presume you seek the same for your court,”not our court,”free as it can be.” She repeats, but with sarcasm on her tongue.
FIRE-LIT, HALF SILHOUETTE AND HALF MYTH, THE WOLF CIRCLES MY PAST, TREADING THE LEAVES INTO A BED TILL HE SLEEPS, BLACK SNOUT ON EXTENDED PAWS. BLACK SNOUT ON SULPHUR BODY, HE NUDGED HIS WAY INTO MY CONSCIOUSNESS. THERE IS NOTHING THAT WON'T BE LIT UP IN THE DARK TORCH OF HIS EYES.
And in heading that nation, I would end it.
Orestes only appraises her. His eyes are as still and calm as the sea on a windless day; that is to say there is some kind of movement beneath them but the surface, the image seems strangely unmoving. There is a depth to his expression that is carefully unreadable. Orestes understands when something has little or no use; and the endeavour he has engaged in promises no satisfaction for either of them. The venom in her tone is a type of passion he has long-since grown accustomed to, in the voices of his deceased Khashran denouncing the virtues of their enemy, or of Solterra nobles chastising the lower caste. It is a special type of arsenic that belongs to those who do not believe in mobility; who are etched strongly in their ways, unmovable.
I did not need you to ask, your majesty. Orestes almost smiles at her heat. Almost. But he doesn’t. He shakes his head, perhaps a little sadly. The cold air bites at his eyes, his ears, the edges of his mouth and nostrils. Faeries are singing in his ears, but he does not go to them. The brook continues to whisper secrets, longing for the ocean it does not yet know. He paws briefly at the snow and glances toward the sky, thinking of how for some reason the air felt as though it held a storm.
“I imagine your spear does not lose its thirst for blood of any kind.” Orestes’s tone is noncommittal when he returns his gaze to her. Strangely, there is no judgement when Orestes states what he perceives as fact; he mentions her nature as offhandedly as one would a lion's hunger on the hunt. Orestes shrugs his shoulders with the suppleness of a cat. You already know the answer to that. She is looking away from him now. “I do,” Orestes agrees. “And I certainly hope you find your place again. But there are changes on the horizon. Good ones, I hope. It is very difficult to make them as long as those who have been wronged maintain their contempt and prejudice, as rightly earned as it may be. I do believe there will always be a place for the Davke in the desert, perhaps long after the kingdom of Solterra continues to exist. But if you ever desire, there would be a place for you as well within the walls of the capital.”
She is not unwise and Orestes cannot blame her for her opinions on his court. Not so many years ago, he had the same opinions of a kingdom that had wronged his people in a similar way. Just as I presume you seek the same for your court, free as it can be.
There is something mischievous in his eyes as he begins to walk away. A smile hints at the edges of his mouth. It is reckless of him, he knows. But he does it anyway. “Free as it can be,” Orestes agrees. Even as he says it he wonders . “It has been a pleasure; but I think I’ve indulged in enough whimsy for the day. There are obligations I must be returning to… regardless, if you ever find yourself within the capitol Avdotya—“ and in that moment Orestes reveals he recognises her bear-skin coat and scarred figure after all ”—we have no Warden, and I can think of no one so versed in warfare and survival as you. Perhaps there will be a time when the Court no longer contradicts your ideologies so heavily, and I might have proven myself more trustworthy than the last few regimes. We have more in common than you might think.”
Orestes lingers just long enough to allow her time to reply, before giving a respectful nod of his head. Orestes then walks back through the snow toward the bridge he sought passage on, faeries pulling at his mane and tail, their laughter like chiming glass.
Unmovable. It is a word that truly suits the woman well; he is right to see her in such a light. Avdotya is wicked and hateful, she is proud and she is vindictive and there isn’t a soul alive who could ever change her - even Jahin, one of the last friends she thought she had in this world wasted his breath in trying to convince her to act not with vengeance but with malleability. Now he stands as regent to the Day Court capitol, no longer a Davke and a traitor in her eyes whether he thinks he is helping them or not. What will he say to his king when the caravans are raided for their goods, pillaged and left burning? What will he tell the people when bodies are found headless, taken by young Davke earning their place? What will the excuse be to ensure his people are not struck down from the desert for their ways. Orestes would be a fool to excuse such crimes, and he does not strike her as a fool.
Peace then, quite simply, cannot exist. No matter how much these men think it possible.
I imagine your spear does not lose its thirst for blood of any kind. She smiles, a half smile that masks the malice hiding behind it. The viper and her spear carry an intimate bond, one stronger than most others she’s shared in her lifetime. They have accompanied each other through many a situation; it is what she used to slay the grizzly she now wears upon her back, it’s seen battle with teryrs and sandwyrms, it helped her bathe the Court in ash and blood. Never is there a moment she spends without it strapped to her leg, always at the ready, always lusting for the hot flesh of another’s throat. Yes, it does not, indeed, Avdotya thinks.
As he continues, she draws a heavy and exasperated breath. Whatever change Orestes is planning will not alter who she is or who the Davke are. It will not reverse time and bring her sister back, nor her fallen brethren. She recalls that day in the canyon... the image of Makeda’s emaciated body - among a horde of others - blanketed by flies and rot forces her skin to crawl with a desperate rage. Someone needed to repay the debt left behind in her wake and she is adamant that there is no settling for anything less than death.
Yet even still, in spite of who she is and her utter lack of interest in bridging long-left gaps, he extends an olive branch. He reaches out with it and turns from her, leaving the offer of a position within his regime sitting heavily in the cold, winter air. She laughs in return. It is throaty, deep inside her chest but not at all excessive; it bubbles with black tar and she tips her head ever so slightly to the sky. This man is a different flavour of king, one Solterra hasn’t seen in some time...
... and she wonders how long he will last.
”Careful, Orestes, it is unwise to invite a wolf into the flock.”
Then she, too, peels away into the frosted pines. Her desert is calling.
