♠︎♤♠︎
i'm tired of the weight of mortality.
i want to tear it from my bones
until i bleed silver and gold.
i'm tired of the weight of mortality.
i want to tear it from my bones
until i bleed silver and gold.
“A
udierunt autem umbrae.” He no longer shivers when the shadow cloak’s familiar chill soaks into his skin, sinks into the notches of his spine. He has invoked it so many times, on so many moons, that without its coldness the desert night embraces him in a pocket of sizzling heat, sweat-sheen slicking his midnight pelt.
The limited visibility, however — that, Caine is still not used to enough. The shadows he wears drinks the light out from the dark, and when the night is dark enough, the boy sees about as well as a blind man on a good day.
He’s picked up enough tricks from his nights under the shadows to elevate his vision to that of a semi-blind man on a very good day, and Caine deems the improvement passable. He dabbles in stealth, after all, and going unseen is more useful a talent to him than seeing where his dagger should slice.
Without the cloak, the plan he is executing tonight would never have come into fruition.
After he had sworn his blade to Fia, Caine returned from the hideout deep in the canyons of the Elatus and spent the better part of a month doing little more than observe Solterra and the suffering of her people with cold, keen eyes.
A month counting the ribs of passing children, their smiles too big for their hollow faces, when the rationing began in earnest. A month swatting away the flies descending in swarms upon the corpses of skeleton-thin newborns, wasted-away elderly, left in the dark of the alleys.
He watched and he watched, and one day, he flipped a coin.
A game he used to play back when he was a younger boy with a sharper knife, blood trailing him instead of shadows. When he could not reach a decision — to spare them, or not — he flipped a coin.
The question had now become: to save them, or not.
Heads, and he would continue as he always has. Watching and waiting and watching. For Fia to send her letters, for food to become scarcer and scarcer, for flies to feast and swarm.
Tails, and he would enter the ivory citadel and begin a game he didn't know if he could win.
The coin came up tails. The game had begun, and the clock was already ticking.
Slipping past the line of velvet-suited guards is childsplay. The Sun Court’s limestone castle practically swims in shadow, and the irony is not lost on Caine.
He tucks himself behind a pillar in an empty corridor, and pulls out a map. An ocean of moving dots covers the worn yellow parchment when he rolls it out carefully, like ants on stale bread. (The rations have starved even ants.)
One for every citizen of Solterra, he knows; but the enchanted map is peculiar. It reveals one name at a time, and only if you know of its bearer. Caine closes his eyes and pictures the curl of an R and the silver of a ghost.
Raum. He is comforted somewhat when he sees that the dot has not moved since the last time he had checked. The blood king (a title some have bestowed on him, for the blood on his coat during his coronation and for the lives he has already reaped) is still in his study.
And from Caine’s observations of him over the past week, when the clock strikes midnight, he will retire to his chambers.
It is ten minutes to midnight. Caine wraps the shadows tighter around him, slides the rolled up map into a crevice he’d found in the pillar, and makes for the king’s chambers.
“Ego liberabit vos.” The shadows slide from his skin and melt into the corners of the room, and already the heat they leave him in begins to feel unbearable.
He shoves the cloak into a satchel slung across his chest, and strides to Raum’s desk. Three minutes to midnight.
He has thought about the precise way he should startle, how much surprise he should reveal when Raum enters the room, for days and days. Imitation has always been the boy’s art, but he had never considered learning how to startle. Some would say it came naturally.
Before he can mull it over further, he grabs an official-looking scroll off the desk and stuffs it into his bag, before rifling carefully through a stack of sealed envelopes. One minute to midnight.
He stops pondering how to appear startled. He tells himself that tonight is just like all other nights. Just another nobleman’s chambers. Just another job.
The more he believes it, the more genuine he will seem when he is proven so, so wrong.
@Raum | "speaks" | notes: hope this works as a starter for them!
