it was meant to be simple
just one golden rule
just one golden rule
E
lif isn’t sure what brings her here, out to the border of the desert where sand merged into city, where everything was the same color, a hundred shades that added up to brown. She has not been sleeping well. Surely none of them have been, not since the news that their queen was dead; maybe even before that, for none of the past few years in Solterra have been particularly kind, much less normal. The pegasus tells herself that it isn’t hunger that wakes her, that has her leaping from her small balcony and into the chilly pre-dawn sky. Instead she tells herself that the cold against her skin, the wind between her feathers and the moon overhead, is like a little piece of that evening with Mateo, at the altar of the world. Never mind that it comes with its own kind of discomfort.
If it is cold she wants, then good: it is all she gets, when the capitol falls away to scattered estates and the song of coyotes. There is shame in the pit of her stomach when she licks dew from a thorny, stubborn shrub, and worse when she has a moment of fleeting jealousy for a lizard that goes darting by, a thick beetle in its jaws. Though in a way it’s a comfort, to know that not all of the Day Court suffers the way its people do beneath the silver king’s tightening fist.
She could leave, she knows. She should leave. It would be as easy as spreading her wings and pointing any direction but east. But stubbornness is as much in her bones and blood as sunlight, as fire, as wind; she will not abandon her city (this she repeats to herself, daily, a mantra that becomes less sure every sunrise. Have so many of them - her family included - not already abandoned her?).
Now the sun is coming up and she’s forgotten again why she’s out here. There is no water among the dunes, any filly still on milk knows as much. But there seems nothing better to do than walk, and listen to the song the wind sings, lonely in the dunes - until the cry of a hawk brings her head up, green eyes bleary.
And there, like a mirage, is Saudagar.
Elif has never been within the estate’s grand grounds. But though the Erdogans were culled from their modest rank with the fall of Zolin, she has still learned of the families whose stars far outshone their own, and has passed over the grounds more than once as a curious girl - though she cannot remember now whether her feelings were of jealousy or disdain (likely both). And she remembers, though dimly (after all, it was another world then) a boy, not much older than her. She had never had an ear for gossip, or she might have remembered that boy had a twin.
Now all she sees is wealth, and power, and both those things mean water and food. Still, were it not for the haze of exhaustion that lays over her like the new dawn, she might have turned away. Instead, defiance draws her upright, lifting her narrow head, and she begins the long approach to the Azhade’s grand door.
Surprise stops her short when she meets the unicorn, a great beast at his side (a hellhound, she remember blearily), and she has to squint her eyes against the glare of the sun off of his molten gold.
She has forgotten her manners entirely. She should curtsy, she thinks dimly, or at least duck her head in some semblance of feigned respect - but all she manages is “Water,” and then she sways on her feet, falters, and ends up on her knees all the same.
{ @Raziel | this got dramatic
