At night, I like to come down to the water and remember.
I listen to the sea churning in the dark, and I marvel at how it sounded exactly the same on the other side of the world, in that place we brought war to– or, no, not war. Freedom, it was freedom.
It was justice. And no matter how tired I am of it all, I will always fight for it. I will always fight for her, until the end of days.
I listen to the crash of the waves and I think of how small my daughters were when we left Novus. I try to recall being that small myself but all I remember anymore is a blue-grey smear of sky and the smell of smoke. I've lived long enough and come so far from my birthplace that my childhood memories are torn and crumbled. They say you die once with your body, and again when the last person who remembers you forgets. I feel suddenly like a murderer and then I remember-- oh wait-- I am.
the thrust of my halberd through flesh. the crush of bones. the sound of someone drowning on their own blood. How, how, how could I forget?
Or, really, how couldn't I?
At some point you realize: all men bleed the same, even the evil ones. In war all men die the same, too, surrounded by filth and ash. Sometimes they go out crying, sometimes screaming, sometimes mouths drawn into a dumbfounded “O” of surprise.
I almost envy the ones who never saw it coming. I know my death will not be a surprise like that. It trails behind me already– I see it there at the corner of my vision, lingering in the shade between the trees. Patient, so very patient. He’s been waiting for me the moment I was born.
Death bites into an apple, leans back into the loamy earth. I think he might be listening to the sea, too. I think he might be remembering. The wind blows gently against our backs.
Death and me, we’re as much at peace as we’ll ever be.
I know I should be grateful.
The clouds part and moonlight makes her entrance, dancing silver on the water. There’s someone else here, too, someone who is not death and not the moon. I hear them step forward softly in the sand behind me. I remember when I was young I always wanted to be alone. Since then I’ve grown to appreciate any escape from my thoughts.
“Nice night.” I call out quietly, without taking my eyes off the sea. Holding so tightly to my memories, and feeling them slip slowly through my grasp anyway.
E I K the world, a double blossom, opens:
sadness of having come,
joy of being here.
There is no place better to practice flying than Terminus Sea. Most of it is far from Solterra, and the ocean brings with it heavy winds at an altitude. Zayir has taken to using the seaside to strengthen the muscles used for flight. The catacombs caused much of his musculature to atrophy. This embarrasses him greatly, and so he has taken to conditioning far from any onlookers.
Zayir uses an updraft to glide. His wings remain fully extended and he hovers, more or less, in the same position as the wind gusts from the sea. Being in the catacombs for so long, Zayir had realised many things.
One of them was his love for flying. Those were his most constantly revisited memories. Soaring, diving, coasting—manoeuvres of acrobatics, and the whole desert sprawled out beneath him as if he were a young god. He had felt, once, as if he would be able to fly across the sea he gazes out across now.
And yes, now—he is brought into the present moment with a vengeance—his pectoral and shoulder muscles strain with the prolonged fatigue of flying. Zayir gets out of breath when ascending to altitude rapidly and, once there, he tires quickly. The reason he uses the sea is because to remain in the air takes fewer wing strokes—the wind is a safety precaution.
But now the wind has died. Zayir begins to strike his wings but they have already reached their capacity—they are hardly strong enough, at the moment, to hold his weight. He begins to descend as carefully as he can manage and, in doing so, catches sight of two stallions on the seaside.
He would like to do nothing more than leave them alone. But his descent is abrupt and leaves him only a few yards away. Zayir does his best to make the entire thing appear intentional. He shakes out his wings and then tucks them neatly against his shoulders, to disguise the way that the fine muscles tremble as a newborn foal’s would, the first time they finished a flight.
Zayir tries to still his heart rate. It thunders in his ears. He tries to prevent his breathing from appearing too laboured. He feels weak. Delicate, even. Zayir does not recognise these stallions.
But that is because everyone he had ever known is dead, by now. Unless they were entombed with him.
“I apologise for disturbing you.” Zayir says, evenly. It is an effort to keep his voice as calm as it is. He arrives just in time to hear the tail-end of what the blanketed stallion was saying. Does the sky look different on the other side of the ocean?
Zayir glances out at the sea. He remembers, once, a journey across it and the way at the end their ship rowed up a deep and seemingly endless river. There, the sky had been cut-blue, like polished angelite stones. Zayir does not share this. That seemed like another life from this one, but even the sky here isn’t exactly as he remembers it. He says politely, “I am Zayir. If I have interrupted, I can continue on.” He thinks, then, of the long walk back to Solterra. In that other life, the trip would have been brief and air-borne. But even now his muscles continue to ache, and tremble, and the journey seems to belong to a younger man.
This, of course, he cannot admit. Not even to himself.
There is a heaviness in Ipomoea’s measured voice, and a weight upon the the white stallion’s scarred body. Zayir recognises warriors when he sees them, and attempts to find some semblance of solace in this; perhaps that is the same, the nobility of men at arms.
It does not occur to him he could be wrong about that, too.
"Speech." || @Ipomoea @Eik || ooc: you both can def kick me out if you'd like <3 I don't wanna interrupt an old friend reunion but... I also have no self control and couldn't resist. I love them both and thought this would be an interesting trio
the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned;
the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity
Another thing you realize, given enough time: how simple everyone is. You grow up thinking you’re this incredibly complex being-- and maybe some of us at least start out that way-- but somewhere along the way you hear yourself talking out loud and it sounds just like something your father would say. And it’s not the first time this has happened. And you realize that just as you once figured out your parents, summed them up in a neat list of traits and quirks, you’ve become that easy to pin down. Despite all the nuance and the details and the little memories, the ones no one else knows about, despite all those years of living it isn’t that hard to capture you in a numbered list.
We’re just a series of patterns. A list of habits good and bad and in between..
The way I tilt my head to one side, like a hound, when I’m listening to something.
The particular laughter I reserve for Isra.
The way I come back here, time and time again, never finding what I’m looking for.
Old dogs, old tricks.
A question floats my way, light as a feather. Does the sky look different on the other side of the ocean? I think about it for just a second.
“No.”
I think I could be defined by the things I don’t say just as much as the things I do. I don’t say that no matter how far I go, it’s all just shades of blue. I don’t say that we hadn’t done a lot of looking at the sky. I don’t say but the fog was different, in the mornings when it came rolling in from the North. A fog so thick you could lose yourself in it. And maybe I did, maybe I did, maybe I did. Maybe I never came home.
But if I was still out there in the fog, who's here in my body?
I glance to Ipomoea. He doesn’t look a day older than the first time we met. How long ago was that-- A year? Three? I get that feeling again, the same one I get when I’m looking at Isra in the lamplight, moonlight over her shoulder like she’s going somewhere. Knowing one day my knees will buckle, my back will break. It was the feeling-- I haven’t felt it since I was a kid-- of being left behind.
But we still have so much to do together.
I try not to think about it. It was too much like stepping on a dagger and then, recognizing the pain, not withdrawing but instead driving it deeper into the flesh with the force of my own body. Thoughts like that, I knew well, were not good. “Hello, Ipomoea.” I smile briefly, tired. My words had more fondness than I felt they had a right to. It wasn't like we were dear old friends or anything. But there was a gentleness to the dawn sovereign that I felt drawn to, a kindred soul. “How have you been?”
Then I turn to the young stranger. He’s just a kid, maybe half my age. Stride of a warrior. So much left to lose, I think. “No, stay.” It’s so easy to brush off his apology, his offer to leave. Nights like this, company just feels right. “I’m Eik.” I smell Solterra on him, and feel that familiar longing for a place that is no longer home. I miss it. The long twilights, the sunlight in the canyons. The citadel and all its secrets. “Tell me about the desert.”
E I K the world, a double blossom, opens:
sadness of having come,
joy of being here.
The unknowing crushes him in the form of his own weakness. The names Ipomoea and Eik are both foreign on his tongue, unfamiliar in their strangeness. Zayir feels if he were to try pronouncing them it would come out twisted, wrong. He looks again at Eik’s scars; and then at Ipomoea’s beautiful, winged feet. That is something he has never seen before and finds as fanciful as a strange dream.
They say, stay and Zayir is disappointed. He had wanted to leave and, as he steps closer to them and to the sea, his legs nearly give way from fatigue. He does not feel like himself in that… these stallions should at least carry some semblance of familiarity, of home, but Zayir cannot even tell their Courts from their scents. He remembers so little of what it is to live.
He is surprised when Eik asks of the desert. In doing so, the other stallion tells Zayir one thing: he has either a fondness or a curiosity of it. This strikes him in a way that is strangely sentimental because the desert is the only place Zayir has ever loved but—
there is so little he can say of it, now.
“The desert,” Zayir repeats, almost slowly. His eyes dart between the two stallions. He answer comes stiffly, as if an admission of a lie. “The desert is, as always, rub’ al khali. The empty quarter. The place where men go to discover themselves or perish. It does not change, only the people who come and go within it.” Zayir is aware in his speaking how formal it sounds, a slanting accent that hardly exists within Solterra anymore. Old Solterran. Royal Solterran. The words of Lady Marcisa Arisetta, formed—so many years later—on his tongue.
Then, perhaps a little humorously, he goes, “In other words, the desert is still terribly dry.”
Then Zayir shrugs his shoulders; he steps closer, more comfortable for having spoken. “Where are both of you from? Foreigners, or natives?” he asks. “Are you both soldiers?” He says it because of Eik’s scars and Ipomoea’s heavy eyes. They are eyes that have seen torment, Zayir things, and is unsettled by.
"Speech." || @Ipomoea @Eik || ooc: Sid asked me to go next!
the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity
I remember colors, scents, sounds. My favorite places the least known-- sections of the Mors where the sand was white and fine as silk; ancient caves in the Elatus, adorned with indecipherable paintings on the wall. As Zayir speaks of the desert I nod, and I remember, and I feel a strange pang of loss even though I know it’s still there, and will always be there.
He speaks with an accent vaguely familiar but mostly unknown. In my day court tenure he had been trapped beneath the golden earth, and few spoke with the old Solterran tongue he did. When he says “in other words, the desert is still terribly dry,” I smile without humor. “That’s good to hear.” Some selfish instinct made me half expect that Solterra had fallen apart without me. But of course I was well and truly happy it hadn’t, and once more humbled by the impassivity of the desert. It was more reliable than the gods and quite a deal more likeable-- spiny plants and terrifying animals be damned.
If I ever prayed it would be to sand, and wind, and sky. And love, of course.
The younger stallion’s question- foreigner or native? could only be asked by someone who has only ever lived in one place. I don’t blame him for it, but it makes my scars itch.
How many years must I live here before I can finally say I am from here? Is it even possible for anyone to reach that number?
I hope my daughters will always call Novus home. I hope they will never question their sense of belonging, the way all foreigners, at some point, must. “Transplant,” I say simply, without a trace of bitterness. I am no longer a foreigner, but I will never be a native. “I live in Denocte now, but I was in Solterra for a while.” To be fair I had lost track of my time there. I’ve never felt solidly rooted in time-- seasons could fly by in the span of a few days, minutes could trickle past in weeks. My sense of scale was wonky.
The second question- are you a soldier?- takes me longer to answer, although it shouldn’t. I have always been a soldier in one form or another. “Yes,” I say after a heartbeat’s hesitation. I want to tell him I am much more than a soldier, but I don’t know if I can with confidence. Some days it feels so true, solid as the good earth beneath me; other days it feels like peacock feathers. “You?” I think I already know the answer, and it makes me grateful we live in times of peace, where two soldiers from different nations could stand by the sea in quiet company. Another place or time, each of us would be obligated to kill the other, or at least try.
I returned my gaze to the sea, which was easier to look at than the stallion I was now imagining myself fighting. How quickly would he react? How strong or weak were those wings? Between my teeth, would they--
oh it can be terrible, the patterns the mind reverts to if you let it. I shook my head. “You’re far from home.” I didn’t think it was a question until I asked it with a meaningful incline of the brow. What brought him so far?
E I K the world, a double blossom, opens:
sadness of having come,
joy of being here.
Zayir recognises the voice of someone who feels fondly—or at least as if they know it—of the desert, of Solterra. There is a question to be had there; a line of conversation worth pursuing, if only Zayir were a little braver, a little quicker on his feet. The strange admits it a moment later. Transplant. I live in Denocte now, but I was in Solterra for a while.
The other man’s admission makes him feel even more out of place. What have you seen or learned of my country that I now do not know? In Zayir’s prime, “transplants”—or more crudely, foreigners—had been even less welcome than they were now, he supposes. He knows this only because of his father, and Lady Marcisa Arisetta.
“Why did you leave?” He asks, after quietly staring out at the sea. Zayir does not look directly at Eik; he focuses instead on the physical things he has some semblance of control over, or at least can react to more comfortably. The breeze, blowing fine strands of hair into his eyes. The brisk, rhythmic current that reminds him of sailing and silver fish jumping high and bright from the cresting waves—
“Also yes.” Zayir responds, noncommitally. He turns his eyes back from the sea to Eik and finds they are engaged in a strange game of look-and-look-away. Eik is staring at the sea now, when only moments prior Zayir had felt the heavy pressure of his gaze.
Zayir has an opportunity to be blatantly honest; to be vulnerable. There is really only answer to the other’s statement—and Zayir reminds himself, it is a statement. With a sly turn of his lips, Zayir says: “And so are you.”
It is the sea that lulls the truth out of him. Each push and pull of the tide relaxes his fatigued muscles—the sound, too, is a sound of peace. Zayir adds, after a pause so long it seems he will not elaborate at all: “Home… doesn’t much feel like home, lately.”
His own accents, in that moment, haunts him. He feels it is so apparent, so blatant. He feels like it is Latin come back to life, or the dead speaking.
I should be dead, he thinks. And a gull laughs at his unspoken joke.
"Speech." || @Eik || ooc: Sid asked me to go next!
the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity
It is a valid question, one that I've asked myself countless times. How do I explain it? The simplest way is this, and I do not hesitate: “I fell in love.”
It was, of course, more complicated than that. I left because my court was not mine anymore. Maybe that makes me a traitor- maybe someone that truly loved Solterra would never have left it as I did. And I often wonder how things would have been if I had stayed and fought. If I had stayed and become a king- I think I could have done it. I think I could have done it well.
But I didn’t just leave because I was in love. “And I was going to be a father.” When I learned there would be twins- when I put my cheek to Isra’s belly and met them for the first time, I knew there was no force in the world that would have kept me from my daughters.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the pieces I loved most about Solterra were so quickly gone, or believed to be gone. Seraphina and Bexley and the things we had done together, the progress we made... all of it shattered in an instant, spread to the dry dusty wind where we all will one day follow. And- here’s the kicker- I didn’t blame Raum for it. Is it selfish of me, or arrogant, to place the blame on myself?
I know I don’t need to express this all in words. I could plant it in his mind, share with him directly the complicated mix of love and guilt, loss and shame and fatigue. Bone-deep weariness. But it would be a cruelty to share my burden like that. And it’s personal.
(“I tried.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“I know, but it’s all I have left.” My hands are full of these crumbled efforts. Ragged scraps of paper, castles of sand. Somewhere, someone is laughing. Somewhere there is always gods-damned laughter.)
“Anyway, you must have been there when Raum was sovereign. You know what it was like.” I don’t know for sure he was there at that time- to be honest there’s some instinct telling me he wasn’t. But his age and accent and Solterran mannerisms suggest someone born and raised in the desert. And I know he lives there now. Maybe the statement is a test of sorts. I find myself suddenly a little more alert, a little on edge. I am carefully listening for clues in the tone of his voice and the lean of his body.
(“Clues-- clues!! For what?? Old man’s gone batty again”)
I think it isn’t like me to be underhanded like this, if you can even call it that… I’ve always been a straight shooter. But I don’t feel like I know myself anymore. I’m probably just tired. Maybe I’m bored, too. I could just reach into his mind, as easy as walking into the sea, and be done with it. Questions answered, mysteries solved. But I don’t. I don’t think I care enough.
Most of the time it’s hard to see the point to anything. Now and then it reveals itself, shy and beautiful, but the moment I have it in my grasp it melts away. Unattainable.
“Home… doesn’t much feel like home, lately.”
I find myself smiling, sad and sour. Sometimes I think home is a lie. Or- maybe not a lie. An illusion. The stuff of fairy- and folktales. Something for children to believe in, or idiots. The older I get the less I believe in home. I don’t think this will be a comfort to the pegasus. I try to dig deep within myself for some wisdom age has granted me, some silver lining or guiding light. All I find is shadows and coal, and I sigh.
“Yes, it does that sometimes.” I think of all the places I have ever called home. How, like people, each of them changed over time, sometimes beyond recognition. “Is that why you’re here?”
E I K the world, a double blossom, opens:
sadness of having come,
joy of being here.
@Zayir <3 ah, Eik may go his way in the next post or two <3
