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S
leep beckons to him. A nightingale’s crooning, honey-sweet lullaby. But Caine does not succumb. He merely grits his teeth, darkens his scowl, and wills himself to lift one hoof in front of the other, over and over, over and over. Like clockwork. You have traveled further distances than this, he reminds himself, and exhaustion laughs in his face.
The sickle moon hangs sallow and weak in the hazy, starless sky. He has a night’s journey left still to undertake before he will finally see the golden sands of the Mors, and beyond that, the ivory palaces of the Sun Court. He has not eaten for three nights, has not slept for two. Staying a moment longer on the smoking shores of Vectaeryn — a fresh surge of hatred pulses through him, when he remembers the gilded extravagance of his birthplace — is a fate worse than a fortnight of hunger and sleeplessness.
He reminds himself of the fact dourly, though this time it is thirst that cackles at his suffering. The pool of light, though strange and lovely in its strangeness, had done nothing to slake Caine’s burning thirst. The water, if it could be called that, had sat upon his tongue like oil and slipped down his throat as substanceless as light itself. A reprieve for nothing but the tediousness of his mind.
The stubble-short grass of the Eleutheria pricks like needles against his ankles, and Caine wishes to do nothing else but take to the skies and leave the menacing earth far, far below. His wings, when he flexes his sore shoulders, gripe angrily at his sides. Let us rest, they hiss at him, and mollified, he listens.
A shadow passes over Caine's features. Later, he will say that he does not remember what had possessed him in that moment.
Softly, he begins to hum.
It starts off hesitant and wavering, like a toddler wobbling on unsteady legs. His silver eyes narrow in concentration, adjusting the tune of his voice, sifting through the vault of his memories.
And slowly, the melody comes.
The music box had been his only possession the first few years he had spent wandering the halls of Agenor’s mansion. He had been left mostly alone, then, the sorcerer only visiting once a day right after sundown, and only for the span of a single hour — never more, never less. Caine remembers those days with longing, sometimes. Agenor had been almost kind.
He had found the golden box, no bigger than a teacup, in the dusty corners of a forbidden room. (There had been many, and he had only been brave enough to stray into one.) He hadn’t known what it was. Not until his curious touch had triggered a hidden latch, and the bezeled lid sprang open like a clam's.
And then, to his fascination, a song had poured forth from the mouth of a spinning, golden stag.
Agenor had confiscated the magical trinket, his expression livid, when the boy had worked up the courage to show it to him a few weeks later. Caine never found it again, but he’d never forgotten the haunting melody.
Weariness and anger and longing erodes the knife-sharp edges of the midnight assassin until he is nothing more than a boy. A boy, humming a song his voice struggles to give a life to.
He does not capture it right. The song lives and dies in his memories. Caine's footsteps stumble to a halt, and there, in the soulless expanse of the Eleutheria, he stands unmoving and silent for a long time.
The first rays of blue dawn peek over the groggy horizon when he finally moves again.
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