like the moon pulled the tide
and the tide pulled the sand
and the tide pulled the sand
“I
didn’t think the Scarab would reach treason so soon.”
Aghavni’s lips made the shape of a smirk, only to drop back into a non-committal hum when she realized the effect was utterly unconvincing. “Ah. Well, it was always a matter of time.”
Truly, she was surprised it had taken this long. The Scarab had never pretended to be something it was not, and Aghavni had always thought its uncompromising morals (or lack of them) indicative of a lesser appreciated brand of honor.
Better a wolf who sharpened its teeth in public than one who hid under the skin of a lamb.
She turned her back to the stained-ice window and leaned against it, wincing when the ice touched her skin. Silent, she studied August as he studied her, reading the lines of tension he concealed so well. His eyes were twin moons in the castle’s ghostly light, and it made him look like something other. Unmoored. Untouchable.
She caught glimpses of this August, this unknowable August, more and more often now, and she could not stop her heart from clenching each time. Aghavni had known — she had always known — that one day he would leave (promising to return, perhaps, but she would stake no hope in it) and she would bade him off with a crooked smile and a good-natured curtsy.
Such was their fate. As immortalized in time as the ice tapestry’s night-black mare and the day-bright stallion. Her path would always be one of shadow, and August was a boy who drank from the sun.
“Does he know who you are?”
Aghavni cast her eyes downwards, tracing the patterns of crisscrossing prints in the snow carpet. “No. Father would not tell him.” But even as her mouth remained set in a cool frown, her voice turned crisp at the end. Stiffened with a note of uncertainty.
She tried to tell herself that her doubt was completely unfounded. Father would never tell anyone he did not trust his longest kept secret — least of all Raum. The king who would not bat an eye at sending cutthroats, possibly even himself, after a looming threat to his already precarious sovereignty: a direct heir to the Solterran throne.
Father had hid her away in Denocte, paid the right people to change the right records, erected memorials for a dead wife and then a not-so-dead daughter — he had done all of that to keep her continued existence a living secret. He would not throw it all away to please an orphan-born king. Sentimentality aside, Senna was just not that type of man.
But then why is the king coming to the Scarab? She could not understand. The letter had left things purposefully obscure, which frustrated her to no end. Her father still didn’t trust her — or believe in her, she couldn’t decide which was worse — with his plans, because he knew he didn’t have to. She would obey him utterly, because he was her father.
And who else do you have left? crooned a black voice in her heart.
“And in any case,” Aghavni said, banishing the treacherous voice back to nonexistence, “I am not Sol anymore. Sol was killed by rebellion-sent cutthroats two years ago. That is what all the records say. That is what Solterra knows.” Her voice was a flat monotone as she recited her death with the detachment of one reading it off the pages of a history book.
“We don’t even look alike. The Weaver made sure of that,” she muttered, wrinkling her nose when her thoughts turned to the Weaver. No matter how many times she visited him — she could never get used to the way he looked at her.
Without warning, Aghavni hopped nimbly from her perch and bumped her shoulder with August's, striding past him with a valiant smile. Normally the sharp-eyed girl was never the one to initiate touch, but she thought she could allow herself the indulgence tonight.
“Now that I have told you that, I suddenly feel much lighter. I hope you are not tired of hearing my troubles, August, because from now on they will only become more prevalent,” she chirped.
This was the game that Scarab-raised children played. Acting like they were perfectly alright, at least on the outside, because none of them knew how to be that on the inside.
Before Aghavni continued down the hall, eager to turn the next corner, to step back into a world of ice queens and glacial beauty, she paused, her face turned away. “I think we are overdue for a spar. Live steel, and this time I shall beat you. What do you say?”
Seraphina's death was a warning to them all. If Raum meant to be a menace, she would at least take a pretty blue eye with her to give to the reaper when he came for them both.
@August | "speaks" | notes: I'm terrible at closers so if I need to throw up another post to make it official I will, but this feels like a good stopping point! <3
