because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky
and the affrighted steed ran on alone
do not weep, for war is kind.
Orestes lays awake at night and tries not to remember the journal of Alaksi, the head hunter under Zolin’s reign.
The man had led the persecution of the Davke. His methods had been extremely successful, but his talents lay not only in the systematic, “open desert” hunting, but a much more brutal genre. Torture. Oh, Alaksi detailed it often enough in the diary he kept. Orestes purchased it from a travelling caravan; many pages were torn out, and worn. The gypsy who sold it—Leksis?— shrugged. “It was only a diary, but we decided it would eventually be of some worth. My grandmother knew of him, when she lived in Solterra, but had never met him. Most of us haven’t even been bothered to read it. ”
Orestes had. The phrase that stuck with him most brutally, barbed like a Goat’s head thorn in the flesh, was: the screaming sands.
He lays awake at night, in his chambers, and thinks of how the suffering Zolin had caused stretched out in the whole wide desert of Solterra, and no gods had acted, no other Court had intervened. It roils within him like a storm. It boils, even, until he feels a bitterness so deep it is a wonder he is not a native Solterran after all. Orestes cannot sleep and so he rises from his overly luxurious quarters—the servants insist, although he more often than not falls asleep in his cluttered study—and exits the sandstone palace. It walks out into the torch-lit streets and wanders to the entrance of the catacombs. The way has been fenced off but, knowing his people, this deters very few from exploration. Including their king.
Steeling himself, Orestes stares down into the darkness.
He is not alone long, however. He hears the telltale sound of hooves against sandstone and looks in the direction of the noise. The king almost smiles, but the excursion seems too somber for that. “Would you care to join me?” Orestes asks.
Isra between the restless bones “it is fervor and agony; it is temper and zeal.””
E
ven across the sea the desert has followed me. There is still grit beneath my teeth and bits of desert weed tangled into my tail that even the tides could not take from me. It chases me through my dreams-- miles and miles of golden dunes that open up their mouths full of teeth and nip as my heels as I race over them. Even when I wake I can still feel it, the sand in my soul calling me to come back home.
The sea is in my blood but the desert is in my soul (the one below this one, the mortal one).
So it does not surprise me to find myself walking through the streets of Solterra and listening to the whispers racing through the crowd like lions through a flock. Some gazes linger on me as I pass, following the place where my shadow tangles with Fable's as he flies overhead. Some of them surely remember the wall collapsing into a pile of diamonds (or maybe they remember the second time I came here with death draped across my heart like a crown).
And perhaps they can see the traces of war in the scars across my hip, or in the darkness of my eyes as I look forward and nowhere else.
I follow the trail of the whispers still racing like lions. I follow the sound of old death, and remembered agony, and the memories of evil mean I was not there to end. My heart breaks even as I promise myself that It will not happen again, not while there is air in my lungs and blood in my heart. Eik loves the desert too much for me to ever hate it, or let it die when I have all the power to save it.
The sight of Orestes breaks up the darkness of my gaze, his form glimmering both before me and in memory. My ocean heart starts to roar, and snarl, and tremble in my chest with something black and dangerous. I want to smile with teeth instead of gentleness when I step closer to join him before the catacombs. My teeth ache beneath the almost-kind curl of my lips when I say, “lead on”, as if my soul is not bellowing for the dark chasm looming beyond us.
The sand rises up around as Fable lands on the rooftop of a nearby building and settles into guard just as had during the time of the last king when I came to set free the suffering. I wonder if it makes this king angry to see the bones waiting for us to walk among their altars; I wonder if he remembers the feeling of being so close to death.
because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky
and the affrighted steed ran on alone
do not weep, for war is kind.
Perhaps, at another time, Orestes would have met Isra’s eyes and seen the sea still in them. Perhaps, if he were younger—if not so many lives had gone on without him—he would have smiled a sad sort of smile and said, I know what it feels like.
But they are opposites. The sea is his Bound—and nearly forgotten—soul. The desert is his godlike boiling, tumultuous blood. The desert is everything he had meant to do in another life, and never had the ability, the power, to complete. The light that pours from the half-arcane, half-forgotten tattoos is the rage of a half-finished life.
But Orestes does not possess the same sensitivities he once had. Those loved-by-the-sea no longer speak his language, nor he theirs. He recognises only enough of it so that when he levels his gaze and smiles a smile gleaming and brilliant he is not surprised to see the lost queen of Denocte, the queen who left to wage a foreign war.
Lead on she says with an almost-smile. Her mythic dragon lands atop a nearby rooftop and Orestes glances at the great beast, a beast he can vaguely—as if through many dreams—remember once having the magic to become. Ariel looks on, too, before sliding into the darkness before the Sovereigns of past and present. The glow of the Sun Lion reflects across the chasm and illuminates the depth of the catacombs within. They stretch so far that one cannot see where they end—only darkness, and more darkness, so readily swallowing the light.
Orestes wonders what has brought her back. The story, of course, had reached him—the queen of Denocte sailing away with her close family to fight a war. He wonders if she will ever tire of fighting such fights. He wonders, too, if she has visited Solterra if only to ensure he is not, in fact, another monster.
For one of the few times in his life, Orestes has a lack of things to say. It may very well be due to their distance, and the haunted encounter that remains in his mind, as she transformed a maze of flowers and grass into a maze of terrors; as he witnessed the anger welling in her soul like a storm at sea, all lightening and hate and reckoning.
Eventually, Orestes settles on discussing the catacombs.
“An earthquake revealed them.” He gestures to the rows of tombs to either wall as they walk into a more open chamber. They are narrow, more like shelves than a proper place of rest. Considering the Solterrans burn their dead, the ghastly and cobwebbed bones seem particularly haunting. “There was an entire group of soldiers imprisoned down here, during Zolin’s reign. One of them had time magic that kept them from ageing, growing thirsty, starving. While time moved on above the catacombs undisturbed, down here it remained a perpetual loop. They emerged and believed we were still warring with Denocte over precious metals.” He smiles a sad kind of smile, one that recognises the scars on her hips and remembers in a way that is all feeling and no fact the way it felt to war, and war, and war for a hundred lives.
“Anyways, this first chamber of the catacombs appears to be entirely within the last few decades. Our scholars are discovering many of those who went missing during Zolin’s reign and identifying them. They are being returned to their families so they may burn the bodies properly. But… the deeper one ventures, the less recognisable the chambers become. They are saying doors and tunnels have been revealed everywhere from Elatus, to the Mors, to the edge of the sea.” He thinks of his own experience in them. He remembers the crystal sarcophagus and bones so old they turned to dust.
“Although, I must admit, I have yet to venture very far. They’ve only been recently revealed.” Ariel continues to pad before them, bright enough it hurts the eyes to look directly at him. The rows of shelf-like tombs seem endless. “Strange, isn’t it, all the things that are dormant beneath us? Things we might never discover.”
Orestes, in the caverns where Solis does not reach, is cool gold and silver. The ornate tattoos do not gleam so brightly, here, but there is that consistent glow of his magic from within that burns like an ember beneath his skin, in his center. At long last he glances at her, with eyes that are old in a young man’s face, with an almost-smile at their edge. He asks, “Tell me, Isra. Do you love the sea?”
The longer he looks, the more he sees it in her. The more she reminds him of it.
And the longer he is here, the less it becomes him, with his ornately braided hair and desert-toned skin. He is Solterra, now.
Yes.
He is Solterra, and Solterra is him.
Ariel glances over his shoulder with sun-bright eyes, knowing. If that is what Isra is here to learn, Orestes hopes she sees it.
"Orestes." || "Ariel." || @Isra || ooc: please excuse my characters who are incapable of short replies
Isra with ten promises “Then it floats away like a paper boat, taken from her by the water licking at her ankles.”
P
erhaps there was a time, once long ago with a skin of sunshine instead of loam, I did not intimately know the way a skull still gleams white in the almost-blackness. If there was I have forgotten it by route of chains, and winter-fire, and evil. Now I only feel a grim understanding blossom up in my soul at the sight of tomb, after tomb, after lonely bones, rising out of darkness. The petals of it feather against my soul like wings caught in a breeze that comes from somewhere terrible buried deep in the cracks of me.
I can feel them. Like kisses.
As we walk on, I do not look at the king who does not smell like the sea anymore. My focus is a sharp, hard living thing on the bones and the tombs (coated in dust without the gleam of well loved things). Each step kiss that furious thing in my cracked, brittle soul. I wonder how he can walk among the forgotten dead, and tell me a story of warriors trapped in this blackness for years, and not feel rage devouring the last smooth edges of his heart.
He smiles, sad and softly golden, and my teeth ache because I want to snarl, and snarl, and roar like a lion among all this forgotten death.
“Strange,” I echo him and my voice is a trembling arrow in a storm. “is not the word I would have chosen for this.” The earth trembles with me as if it's only a dying thing leaking secrets instead of sorrow. I do not flinch as a rock tumbles down from the ceiling between us.
And I do not smile as every pile of dust, and decay, and agony turns to flowers heavy with diamond-dust instead of pollen. I wish I could give them more than flowers, these piles of bones with no stories left to remember them by but this endless maze of suffering.
I wonder if I will ever smile, really smile, again.
How many times will I need to shred myself to save the world? How many times will my soul crack and bleed?
“Where are the soldiers now?” I will find them and beg them for forgiveness for all those mortals that watched their world fall to pieces and did nothing to stop it. And then I will find the gods that did not care to save them. I will devour their idols in stone and turn their mountains into meadows thick with ruby flowers.
My bones ache and bellow at me to turn back, turn back, turn back. There are a million more things in this darkness that I know will break and shatter the last unbroken bits of me. I want to run back to the church-tree and listen to the glass and stone sing a song to me in a autumn storm. I want Eik, and my daughters, and Fable curling his wings around us like shelter given flesh and form. I want, I want, I want--
To raise this Zolin from his grave and pluck his bones loose like weeds from a garden.
Brine leaks from my pores like tears when I finally turn back to Orestes and his lion with their eyes on me like blades I am too hard to feel. My lungs rasp as if I am drowning in this sentient black air so far from the sea. I wonder if I should lie to him.
“Sometimes I hate the sea.” The truth rings like steel on my lips. Another truth for this golden king who smiles and dreams of things I cannot believe in anymore. And I wonder if he will be cut by the blade or learn to brandish one of his own.
Two Travelers were walking along the seashore. Far out they saw something riding on the waves.
"Look," said one, "a great ship rides in from distant lands, bearing rich treasures!"
The object they saw came ever nearer the shore.
"No," said the other, "that is not a treasure ship. That is some fisherman's skiff, with the day's catch of savoury fish."
Orestes mind is not on the death around them; it is on the way that as they enter the catacombs, the light abandons them. It drains from his tattoos like an animal slaughtered; it drains from his being as if it has never existed, at all. Ariel, more omnipotent than he will ever be, keeps the absolute at bay—but barely, just so, with a throbbing ember-like glow that pulsates and pools around them against bones and decay and rusted weapons. He watches the fringes of the light against the dark rather than Isra—but perhaps watching that is the same as watching her.
A battle older than time. The stars against the endless abyss. Beating, fragile hearts against the finite world around them. Live, live, live says the echo of their blood. And the skulls around them say, I am coming, and I will always be sooner than you expect. Isra’s voice breaks the silence Orestes’s allowed to grow, after his introduction to the catacombs.
Strange is not the word I would have chosen for this.
Her fury is nearly palpable; but rather than transform the catacombs around her into something even more dangerous, they bloom with flowers dusted in diamond. It is to Asterion Orestes said, Strength is its own kind of weakness. It is with Asterion and Isra’s own daughter he had thought, we all give pieces of ourselves until there is nothing left to give.
He bears witness to Isra as she carves another pound of flesh out of her heart, an offering to a world that will never stop bleeding. Where are the soldiers now?
Orestes wants to ask, does it matter?
He doesn’t. The question is cruel; edged with Solterra’s hard pride, and tendency toward apathy. Perhaps it is Ariel who taught Orestes that, the first time Orestes felt him kill a fawn through their bond.
It was my teeth at the soft thing’s throat.
Except it hadn’t been.
Does it matter?
“Some awoke disoriented. Many are unaccounted for. A handful awoke with their mind’s gone. Many more will never wake up at all.”
They are hard, pragmatic truths.
This woman makes him feel heavier than any he has ever known before; she makes him feel as heavy as the see had, so many years ago. In this body, Orestes thinks, he had almost been in Novus longer than he had been in his homeland. But he remembers, in the way one remembers a phantom limb: all the Souls he had been meant to save, all the Souls who were in his charge and were not lost not to the sea, but to violent men. The sun at his brow aches. The sun at his brow is a vivid reminder that he, too, is Bound.
“And why is that, Isra?” She smells like salt and a little like death. After all, the sea always smells a little like death. Then:
“Did you defeat the monster you sailed across it to find?”
The rumours always fly far and wide. Even when they sound like stories, Orestes believes them. Even when they sound like long-lost fables, or fairytales, or things too like myth to be real.
How can he not, in a world where he is a star and she is the sea, and there is a lion older than the desert leading them through the agony of men?
Perhaps he is naive for being reminded of something of himself, in her. In her fury. In her bloodied desire for justice. It reminds him of a hundred lifetimes ago, when his land was first punished by the arrival of foreigner.
He had lived a hundred more fighting that same foreigner.
And now he knows the story because he reads what he had written in half-mad haze months and months ago, and it reads as if it belongs to another man. Orestes walks past her, nearly brushing shoulders, pressing deeper into the tunnel.
"Orestes." || "Ariel." || @Isra
Still nearer came the object. The waves washed it up on shore.
"It is a chest of gold lost from some wreck," they cried. Both Travelers rushed to the beach, but there they found nothing but a water-soaked log.
Isra who is neither man nor king “the clouds gathered behind the army as if a creature alive, black and churning in fury.”
T
his is why all the heroes are dead, all the knights dissolved into dust, and the saviors broken down into piles of burned flesh and feathers. Hope has turned into bone and salvation is nothing more than a hundred rivers of blood running out to the horizon on the tide. In his look there are a million other men, and kings, with their empty crowns of gold and not a drop of courage enough to say, no.
They do not have courage enough to bare their teeth to the gods and the black space beyond them and below that word over and over again like a chant. No. No. No.
But I do. I have wrath where he has apathy eating away the brightness of everything that he could be like entropy eating at a bit of muscle. I hope his knees were bloody from digging out the survivors and I hope his dreams are full to bloating with the suffering of the people beneath his city. I hope, oh I hope, that he will understand when I lay my teeth at his throat before I scream, no.
And I wonder if he can see the sea or fire enough to evaporate it in my gaze when I tremble with empathy and fury. Mercy has failed me over and over again, but this-- this has taught me that I must be smoke, and steel, and magic to rattle down the stars and their dark shadows so that there might be light enough to blind the darkness back, back, back.
A million men have failed, a thousand kings.
I am neither.
“How easy it is for you to sound so cold.” I say and imagine my teeth at his throat so that he might learn how the words should vibrate in his blood. But I want to say, how easy it is for you to fail and let my teeth do more than lay like petals instead of bone against him. I step closer to him, turning dust to diamonds and more flowers that no one but me cares to bring all the hollow cages of the dead. Does he see softness or violence enough to take his cold stone throne from beneath him?
Perhaps I should have lived in the desert, where softness is weakness and blood split worth more than gold. Perhaps I should learn to love the barren sand as Eik does.
Perhaps....
“Have I ever told you the story of the sea and I, Orestes?” There is no gentleness in my look, none of the story-teller brightness that should be in my eyes at the beginning of a tale. “Or how the primordial ocean, and broken men, and kings have all tried to take choice away from me?” I try to smile instead of snarl like a rabid thing, I try to be gentle with another thing without courage. I exhale, and inhale, and it is a wonder that we can breathe this air at all.
“Would you like to know all the ways how they tried to break me down to nothing but down-softness and swan-white purity?” Our shoulders brush again, in the death darkness, and I feel like I am burning embers brushing against bones cold enough that they belong at the black bottom of the sea.
I smile in the gloaming with the dust of the death caught between my teeth like pearls I want to choke on. “Or should I tell you about how all the monsters with chains forged out of love and salvation are nothing more than all this dust tracking our hoof-prints like we are lines of ink on a map?” I do not look at him, I cannot, not now with this dark apathy that pretends to know the world in his gaze.
The catacombs almost seem to welcome me, another thing that should have died over and over again for a million purposes that were not my own, as I pass the sun king. And when I lift my nose to the pathway beyond the walls, the one leading to the sea, it's almost impossible to tell whether it is Fable or the Sea roaring outside the darkness.
Does it even matter which, when my magic starts to turn dust to water and maggot to butterfly around us?
Two Travelers were walking along the seashore. Far out they saw something riding on the waves.
"Look," said one, "a great ship rides in from distant lands, bearing rich treasures!"
The object they saw came ever nearer the shore.
"No," said the other, "that is not a treasure ship. That is some fisherman's skiff, with the day's catch of savoury fish."
Orestes, at first, is too tired and too old to be made furious by her youthful pride. How easy it is for you to sound so cold. Isra says, as if she knows him. Isra says, as if she has seen his entire orchestra of lives played out before her, one after the other after the other, a string of instruments singing into the void that is life and death and the purgatory between.
As if she knows in his first life they called him Unalaq, after the West Wind that brought storms to the coast. He had been the wind, and the storm. And as such, Unalaq had been the first to die among the foreigners, the first to meet them, the one who brought them to their island. (Does she know that in that life, he died by fire, burned alive atop a pyre so all his people could know the First Treaty had been denied? Does she know they mounted his head outside the walls of their stone-and-mud homes—newly built—and left it there until summer came and dried the flesh, like fish skin? Or how when he was reborn—before they knew to Bind the Soul—his people cried for four days and four nights? They knew the gentle Souls of the Khashran would never be the same. They’d been touched by a violence too great.)
Isra is close to him, now, and her comment evokes anything but coldness from him; Orestes’s skin wafts the heat of the sun and, for the first time, his tattoos become alight with the light of it in the darkness of the catacombs. His eyes are gold when he turns to her, gold and pouring light.
But Orestes listens.
He listens, before he speaks.
Have I ever told you the story of the sea and I, Orestes? Of how the primordial ocean, and broken men, and kings have all tried to take choice away from me?
Orestes does not need to be told the story.
He learned long ago there is no choice. From the moment a child is borne into this world, its cries alight in the air, all choices are taken from them. There is only the forward momentum of all things that came before, and would come after, their brith. Her smile-turned-snarl twists his mouth in something that glows thick and golden and ancient.
Would you like to know all the ways how they tried to break me down to nothing but down-softness and swan-white purity?
In his second life, they had called him Kallik, for the lightening in his soul and the fury he brought with him into his Second Coming. Yes, in his second life—and Orestes remembers this, he remembers it because he wrote it and the story, now, belongs to it’s own book in his study, the story of Kallik, his second life, the story of Kallik, who started the War. The story of Kallik, who lead them to desolation. But it would take generations to get there. In Kallik’s lifetime, they had nearly overcome the foreigners who sought to settle their island. They were still capable of great and terrible magic and Kallik, himself, razed the entire colony in the shape of a tremendous blue dragon.
Kallik, however, had died of poison. A mutiny among his own, when too many warriors were lost to the mission.
Or should I tell you about how all the monsters with chains forged out of love and salvation are nothing more than all this dust tracking our hoof-prints like we are lines of ink on a map?
Then, he had been Nanouk. And after Nanouk came Theseus. After Theseus was Kier. After Kier came Anaxander. After Anaxander, Akycha. After Akycha, Pyrrhos. Then, Caesarion, Noatak, Demetrious, Taqukaq and, finally, finally Orestes. The last life. The final prince.
Beneath his hooves, the dust streams with the water of her magic, and butterflies begin to flutter about his face. “I had always expected more of you, Isra.” His voice is not cold when he says it, stepping back from her. No, when he speaks his voice is wracked with a strange kind of sadness. Orestes is not meant for this place, or her wrath, or the way death becomes her more than the sunlight above, and despite her butterflies she is full of wasps. “For all your righteous fury, you have chosen to become exactly what the primordial sea, and broken men, and kings have made you. Are you telling me this—“
And he gestures at everything, the diamonds, the water, the butterflies, the way skulls turn to dust at her barest touch. “—is in your nature? That the choice to become this—near goddess, near immortal, near monster—was yours?” His voice is hard when he says, “In all your saving of others, have you ever stopped to save yourself? Yes, you have overcome all the things that sought to defeat you. I’ve heard the stories. You have destroyed them and, in the process, allowed them to cut away the pieces of who you once were. The cruel sea and broken men and kings with too much power; all things that seek to devour, and devour, and devour. You speak as if you are the only one who has suffered such evils. Oh, I understand your wrath.” Orestes begins to turn but it is Ariel, first, who twists to return the way they had come. “But you wield it as if you are the only Soul who has ever fought them. You assume I am cold. But I am what I am because I have seen how the world ends when, as a saviour, you too try to devour it.” Orestes is staring over his shoulder, into the darkness that she stares down. He will leave her, then, to search for her monsters and her death-things and to come out singing on the other side with the sea and her dragon and her myth.
Yes, he will leave her. Because in all his lives he has learned the quickest way to burning is rage, and fury, and the way righteousness can be as bad as maliciousness, as evil. “You are welcome to Solterra anytime, Lady of the Sea. But do not bring your fury here. Do not bring your anger at ghosts and dead tyrants and all the evils the world will ever suffer. Or at least, I ask you not to.” His mouth twists wryly. “I can't make you do anything. No, you have made it clear to all of Novus you are the most powerful among us, able to desecrate entire armies.”
Orestes finds it difficult to tear himself away; but he will not, he cannot, let her fury devour him as well. “I cannot help but wonder, Isra, how heavy that is on your Soul?”
He is struck, suddenly, by Aspara.
He wonders if her mother had ever been so soft.
"Orestes." || "Ariel." || @Isra
Still nearer came the object. The waves washed it up on shore.
"It is a chest of gold lost from some wreck," they cried. Both Travelers rushed to the beach, but there they found nothing but a water-soaked log.
