THE SUN ITSELF KNOWS THE SAD TRUTH OF HOW WE SURRENDERED OUR LIVES AND DEATHS TO SIMPLE RITUAL, USELESS CRAVEN RITUAL, HOW WE SAID NO TO THE MOST BEAUTIFUL "YES" EVER UTTERED, LIFE ITSELF.
Do you know what shapes a monster can take?
Yes, some have teeth and claws.
Basilisks, dragons, creatures as simple as a killer whale
tossing
tossing
tossing a seal, again and again, to play.
Do you know wild dogs will eat their prey alive, its innards ripped out, still struggling? They do. It is monstrous.
Orestes knows what shapes a monster takes. He has wielded fangs and claws and tremendous, terrifying power. He has been a kraken from the deep, a dragon that roars from the parapets of black cliff-rocks, a sperm whale that reaches depths so deep and so dark there are no words for them. But a monster, to Orestes, is a man with a smile like a blade and words like so much honey. The people who killed them best were always veiled with good intent, peace treaties and promises. They wore their most decorated uniforms to parade and systematic genocide. It was Vercingtorix who offered the olive branch and threw a thin gold net upon Orestes so that he could not escape. Vercingtorix said, first, “We want to end this war between us.”
Orestes has thought of that quite often, and he thinks of it now, as he wanders the streets of a foreign city and knows that it is now his. His responsibility. The people are his to protect, to guide, to serve. He wonders at the things Raum had said before committing atrocities as he scours the virtually deserted streets. He wonders what all bad men say before doing bad deeds and wonders why there are not more teeth to meet them, why he hadn’t been quite quick enough.
He wonders if he could have saved them.
But those thoughts are a quick way toward madness and so he stops at the only vendor open in the otherwise empty market to distract them. His hooves echo, step by step, against the sandstone. He is met by a shrewd, dark woman with kohl-lined eyes. She has a tired face and seems surprised, but not displeased, to see him.
“Are those prickly pears?” he asks conversationally, and as she affirms, he asks to buy several. The fruit has their spines meticulously removed, and the flesh of the fruit is a brilliant, nearly override red. “I would also love several loaves of bread, please. And a jar of the prickly pear jam.” The vendor bags them for him lethargically. Orestes cannot blame her. The sun is hot even in midmorning.
“What is your name, madam?”
“Friza.”
Orestes smiles again. “Thank you, Friza. I was wondering—how long have you been here?”
She says, “Several years. I’ve worked here since I was a girl.”
Orestes asks that she share her experiences, and she goes on to share her father’s story of a market before Zolin that had been bustling with life. It centred, she informed him—although Orestes already knew, from reading more history books than he could stomach easily—on the proficient blacksmiths and Solterran steel, that resident’s of Novus travelled from far reaches to obtain. Then, there was the crash of the market and the rise of a proficient black market it in’s place, one that made business difficult. Not to mention the drought. As she continued to speak, Orestes’ brows furrowed further and further. “Thank you for your time, Friza.” Another smile, this time a little sadder: “I will be back tomorrow.” It is a promise.
He leaves the vendor and the empty market, increasingly distraught to discover the abandoned vendors in disrepair and a fountain that no longer contains water. What little exists is stagnant. There is movement in his peripheral, and Orestes discovers a young boy standing in an alleyway. The boy starts to have Orestes’ eyes upon him, and begins to turn away. “Wait a moment, please.”
The colt does as told, but there is distinct distrust in his eyes. Orestes asks, “Do you work in the market?” As he asks, he thinks that the colt is not truly a colt, but a very young stallion—nearly a yearling, but not quite. “No. I—I. I’m just here.”
Orestes’ cocks his head. “Are you hungry?”
The yearling refuses to look directly at Orestes now. His mouth begins to form the shape of a denial, but then he changes his mind. “Yes.”
Orestes sets down the sack of bread and jam. “Here, allow me.” He prepares a loaf with the jam and hands it to the young stallion, who takes it first with appreciation and then with a bit of hurriedness, as though believing Orestes will retake his offering. “You can take more. Go ahead and share it, if you can.”
Then Orestes is walking again and his mind is
turning
turning
turning,
over the image in his head of a the dark young stallion with showing ribs, the skeletal market, the empty fountain. It distresses him greatly. He wonders—where did the blacksmiths go? Where did the steel go? He stops for a moment beneath a banner hung between two pueblo-style buildings, silken, with images of the sun.
Why, Solis? he wonders, gazing at the symbols. Orestes does not expect an answer, but the hollow reverberation of the thought within him brings to mind a stone dropped in water, sinking, sinking.
Orestes knew many pains, but never the pain of going hungry. He pauses for a moment and discovers an abandoned wooden table beneath the shaded overhand that looked as though, once, it had been some form of bakery. It is empty now, but Orestes removes the bread and jam one more time. He prepares one for himself, but hesitates when he hears movement in the alleyway beside him. From the angle he rests, he cannot see within, but he calls out— “Would you like to join me?”
t feels strange to walk the city streets again. It feels to him as though something should be happening, something other than the quiet and the emptiness he is greeted with today - his heart is still thrumming painfully quickly, agonizingly loudly. As if it remembers the last time he had been here, as if it still senses the remnants of danger and quakes because of it.
It makes him want to run again, away from the invisible dangers and the memories and the quiet that is louder than thunder. But he doesn’t. Instead Ipomoea only walks, and he watches, and he remembers the way the markets used to look.
When he was younger, before he had known anything other than the desert and the sun, this had been his favorite place. The water in the fountains had always been cool, and had drawn characters of all sorts to them. It had been the place where the traveling merchants and entertainers would flock, selling their wares and putting on shows for the common folk like him. Back then the markets had always been alive with laughter and music and bartering, a world of its own that contrasted the harshness of the surrounding desert. It was a hub of life and liveliness, and when he thinks back on it he thinks that maybe it had been the place where he had first learned how to live.
Now it’s hard to imagine the markets from his memories as being the same ones here today. It’s too different, too grim now; even in all the time that’s passed, still it has not recovered. He had heard the talk when he first arrived, the whispers of a new king who had walked through fire but did not burn. Ipomoea is not sure how much of the rumors he believed - they had carried hope of a brighter future, of change and restoration, but so far he had yet to see any of it.
And the longer he wanders the streets, the less he believes of those rumors.
Until he comes upon a man with the sun marked upon his brow in gold, sitting alone at a derelict table. And although the overhang looks ready to collapse and a layer of dust (or is it ash?) covers every surface, his presence alone makes it look more like a castle than the hovel that it is.
”Would you like to join me?” He had stopped there in the shadows, watching the flaxen haired stranger. But at the sound of his voice Ipomoea stirs, and while his heart is still begging him to run he steps forward slowly.
Swallowing thickly of grime and sunlight, he answers: “It would be my pleasure.”
He steps carefully around the table, and his wings are reaching again, feathers that are stained brown with dirt opening and closing and opening again, grasping only the empty air. There’s bread on the table, and jam, and for the first time the air smells good and fresh again.
His eyes are sharp and searching as he seats himself on the opposite side of the wooden table. And Ipomoea breathes in deeply again before he lifts his chin and asks -
“Who are you?”
He thinks he knows - or at least that he should know - but still he waits for his answer, and makes no move to reach for the bread.
@orestes | "speaks" | notes
me: no new threads until i close a couple more
also me: ok maybe just this one
When he closes his eyes, it is not so hard to imagine what this place had once been and could still become. It is so close—the sound of the fountain chiming with water and life, the bustle of a crowd about the vendor stalls with haggling. Perhaps it is only an off day. He hopes so. Perhaps it is the city adjusting to his reign after the cruelty of Raum’s. Orestes hopes for that, too, but he is immensely gladdened that he is no longer alone in facing the sight.
There is something about the stranger that seems vaguely other, as if the desert does not accept him. Orestes knows that othernness, however; because many say he still wears it, like a coat of misbelonging. It does not matter; he is glad for the company. This stranger—Orestes does not recognise him from his court, although he still does not know all the faces—wears the dark, rosy bay of the forest at daybreak, with the dawn light streaming against the dark boughs of trees. There are flowers woven in his hair, and the sight of it twitches the edges of Orestes’s mouth in a smile.
Who are you?
Orestes does not answer immediately. Instead, he gestures at the bread and jam with his chin. “Please, help yourself.”
For some reason, the setting—somewhat decrepit, sunstained but browbeaten—reminds him of Boudika when she asked him, once, How do you maintain your dignity? Weak, bluish light had strained in through the overhead, barred window of their cells. It smelled of rotted sea air, all seaweed and fish and the rust of iron bars.
It was when he had been imprisoned. It was when his hair had hung lank and wet against his brow, and his skin smelt of burning where they painted gold on his flesh. He had not known how to answer her then, and still: the answer escapes him, as he glances at the quiet street. It is not so hard for Orestes to imagine it full of life; he does not know if it is so empty because of him, or Raum, and that question aches within him with all the resonance of a struck chord.
“My name is Orestes, the new Sovereign.” he says, softly, politely. His eyes settle, now, upon the stranger. “And the pleasure is mine. I am sorry if you are of my Court—I do not recognise you. What is your name?” Orestes reaches, then, for the bread and jam. It is sweet, but tart, and he enjoys it immensely.
A raven flies overhead, and down the road a horse crosses the street. Their hooves echo against the sandstone, and he thinks again,
How do you maintain your dignity?
It is not so easy, he thinks, when one emerges from beneath the reign of a tyrant and expects another. Orestes does not show it, but anticipation fills him. As the seconds pass, he is more and more certain the man with winged hooves and eyes like rose petals is not of his land but somewhere else.
pomoea can’t help but wonder if whoever had marked Orestes’ brow with the sun had somehow known what he would become. Sovereign of a beggar city, bathed in the light of the sun. Had they whispered to him that he would soon rule over the day? Or had they cautioned him that the day would soon rule him? Perhaps they had said nothing at all.
He wonders what they would think now. What they would say when tales reached them of the man who walked through a fire and did not burn, who knelt like a parishioner at an altar to be crowned not by a priest, but by a lion. Stranger things had happened, Ipomoea had seen so for himself - but how many were in this city who had not?
A part of him thinks that he shouldn’t have come here, not today. The desert is no friend to him, it never had been. He knew already that if he gave it the chance, it would swallow him whole, bury him beneath all that sand and sun. A merchant had told him once that the Mors sang, that its dunes danced - but Ipomoea knows it would only laugh at him, while it buried him out there all alone. Solterra never wept, least of all for him. It did not love him, and he was not so sure he loved it. Not the way he loved the forest.
But he had come to see if the new king was truly a king. He knows he shouldn’t care, knew that the people here didn’t want his opinion of their city. To them he was an outsider, perhaps even more so than Orestes was.
A small part of him is breaking at the thought, because of how different things could have been.
The rest of him pretends to not feel it.
The jam tastes like his childhood, like sand and sun and something empty. But he forces himself to swallow it anyway, while he thinks to himself that even the bakers have found a way to tell him that he has no right to be here. The next bite he takes he is determined to taste the sweetness. He almost fails. A raven croaks as it flies past, and it, too, sounds like it’s laughing at him.
"Orestes," he echoes. Long live the king.
His eyes are shockingly blue, a color seldom seen in Solterra. But his body is gold, and that more than makes up for it. Ipomoea holds the stranger’s gaze, feeling like he ought to know him from somewhere, but he can’t remember where. So when Orestes asks his name, he hesitates. But only for a moment.
"I was born here," he tells him, and something in his voice seems to be saying but you were not, and it isn’t a question.
He continues.
"The desert gave me a name, once," he had always wondered as a boy if his parents had ever bothered to name him. Now he knows. "But I don’t remember it.” "
He listens to the echoing of hooves on the city street, flicking an ear in the lone horse’s direction. The wind turns a tumbleweed, over and over and over again, and Ipomoea wonders if the plant remembers what it had been before it died. Before it became a dead, dry thing tumbling through a ghost town.
Knowledge is its own kind of crown; and this white-splashed stranger wears it. There is something he knows, or something he wants to know, and Orestes cannot decide which one it is.
This is something in Orestes's short time in Novus that he has grown accustomed to. It will never matter what he learns, or how much he sweats for them, or even if he bleeds. There will always be a question mark curled around his name. Orestes? Orestes, the foreigner; the sun-shining prince; the usurper, the stranger, the non-native.
Orestes watches the stranger eat the bread, quietly; he listens to the quiet streets and does not further press the issue, or the conversation. He measures himself, despite the faint irritation he feels. Orestes cannot say why, but he does not believe this man to be of his court. His eyes are drawn again and again to the stranger’s winged heels; Orestes cannot make sense of them.
I was born here, he confesses.
Orestes listens with rapt attention; the raven roosts above them, and then takes flight again. There is the sound of a pulled cart somewhere, down a distant street.
Have you ever been anyone but Orestes?
He cannot help but raise a brow. “That is a very personal question to ask someone, when you still have not introduced yourself.”
Orestes decides not to hold it against him; there is something tense beneath the surface, something that promises a sort of catharsis, or at least admission. The desert gave me a name once. But I don’t remember it.
At first, the new Sovereign does not know how to answer the question. But for now, his memories are still fresh; and the magic blood of his homeland has yet to bleed from him. “Yes, and no.”
It is perhaps the only way to answer the question. He pauses for a moment; glances at the clear-blue, too-bright-blue, tragic-blue kind of sky. “I was born far from Novus to a land of warring people. Mine, so long as they stayed tied to the island, had eternal lives. I have been Orestes many times before.”
It used to be that he would say, and many times again.
But this time, he cannot. “But my people are all gone now. This is the one life I have left and so I will make use of it.”
However, the desert is so very different from the sea. Briefly, so briefly, he recollects what it used to feel like to swim with them, his beautiful, tragic people. The way that their movement was a melody more than an act; a sound or feeling more than an actuality. He wonders how long he will have those memories; if they will stay with him until the end, or be taken from him, one by one.
Orestes closes his eyes for a moment, brief, before opening them again. They do not express the sentiment he feels aside from in their profound depth, when he turns them upon the ankle-winged stranger.
“And you, desert-born? You have been more than one person, it sounds.” The comment might have been hard, if not for the smile that dances at the edges of his mouth, waiting to be born. Orestes adds, “What other lives have you lived, since the desert has forgotten you?”
It might have been cruel. But could it be cruel coming from a man who had been forgotten several times over? Orestes nearly apologises for his shortness; for his lack of tact. But he does not appreciate the interrogation from someone that does not even call Solterra home.
ometimes, when he would stand out in the meadows of Delumine, surrounded by dancing wildflowers and endless space, he would close his eyes and imagine the desert.
The sun was never hot enough, not hot like it was here, but on a sunny, summer day it was just enough to pretend. To pretend it was not grass reaching up to caress his knees, but sand that his hooves sank into, and let the warm, westbound wind take him back in time. And he would wonder at what his life may have been like, perhaps should have been like, had he only been strong enough to survive.
He and the other Solterran orphans, the ones who had never known their families, would sometimes sit around and fill in the gaps in their memories with the wildest of tales they could imagine. They would imagine themselves as long-lost princes and princesses, heirs to the throne, sorely missed. Or children of the wealthy houses, Hajakha maybe, or Azhade, a long-lost relative that might one day be welcomed back with celebration.
Now, Ipomoea wonders how he could have ever imagined his blood to have been royal. Now that he knew how far his heritage truly lie, that he had not only been found in the desert, but had rather been born of it.
(For years to come, he’ll worry over each spike of anger as being his Davke heritage finally showing. And he’ll wonder how he could have ever imagined it to be anything other than what it is, that feral side of him that smiles with sharp white teeth-)
Even now he can feel that silent beast rising in his chest, and he prays that it doesn’t show when he looks at Orestes.
"All your people will ask you personal questions, Orestes. They will want to know you, and only by knowing you will they will claim you as their own." He doesn’t expect him to answer - Ipomoea is already pushing the bread away, ready to stand and turn away, when the Sovereign’s voice stops him.
He’s staring down at the jam the sovereign has brought with him, counting the dark black seeds pressed against the jar glass. The color is too red, too bright; he can’t look away from it.
"Where did they go?" His voice is a whisper, the words gone before he can stop them. Or rather, his mind whispers, why did you leave them? Ipomoea can’t help but wonder what would make Orestes a king here, when he might still have been a king there. But he doesn’t want an answer, nor does he expect one, so before the gold-etched man can answer, perhaps before he can even register the question, Ipomoea lifts his chin and says instead, "I suppose Solterra is lucky to have you now."
Lucky to have you instead of Raum. Instead of Zolin. Instead of another monster.
But Ipomoea has yet to judge the new sovereign’s fitness. Perhaps anyone was an improvement from the last, but the man who replaces the dictator is not always the man a country needs.
"An orphan. A beggar. A wanderer." He checks the names off mentally as he lists them, titles he hasn’t thought of in years. Not since he’s become someone, someone who might even be missed when the desert covers his bones under a thousand layers of sand. "It took me a long time to find a home, longer than it took me to realize that this was not it."
His heart is beating like something wild again, his wings fluttering against his ankles, stretching out and out and out like they’re reaching for the skies, like they need to fly or else they might die. The last time he was here he was running - running out of the capitol, out of the desert, afraid to look back or else he might see the stone faces again, and then he would stop. And if he stopped then, he might never have looked away, might have lost himself for the second time there in the Mors, alone and forgotten. So instead he ran.
All his life he’s been running, it took Raum for him to see that.
"Now I’m fettered to the same sense of duty as you. Emissary, Regent, now Sovereign; all we can do is give all that we are so that we might leave this world better than how we found it. We belong to our people now, you to Day, and I to Dawn."
He folds his wings, forces them to be still again. There’s something sad in his eyes, eyes the same color as the jam sitting on the table between them. But for as much sadness, there’s twice as much determination and steel as one king looks at the other, and silently makes a promise. Solterra may not be his home; Solterra may have forgotten him before he had even been given a proper name; but Ipomoea had not forgotten Solterra. And he would not let it fall back to ruin so easily.
@orestes | "speaks" | someone is questioning his entire life now isn't he
n the end there is only this: two Sovereigns sharing a loaf of bread while around them, the belly of the city curls in upon itself from hunger. It is why the bread tastes like ash on his tongue, why after the first bite he cannot bear to swallow the second. Not when the memory of hunger is clutching at him, not when he knows all too well what it is like to stand on these very streets and beg the shopkeep who tended this building for a bit of the bread he had burned by mistake.
Ipomoea wants to tell him that he should have bought everything the bakery had to offer. That he should have done more. That they did not kill Raum and his monster for the city to die a slower death.
"Thank you for the bread," his voice is as thin as a whisper as he stands. "I hope you have enough of it to feed your starving city."
Because in his eyes are a promise, when he leaves the rundown shop behind and goes out into the sun, and the sand. And it is there in every fig tree and prickly pear and prairie poppy that grows in his footsteps. If you do not -- I will.
