perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage--perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that once our loves
- rainer rilke
- rainer rilke
Breathe.
One, two.
Breathe, and the air is crisp,
crisp,
but not as crisp as it feels to breathe the sea. His lungs fill with air, but he lusts for salt-water.
Denocte is dark.
His soul feels a little like that. Behind a moon. Heavy, heavy.
Too heavy.
He sighs, and it is a thing that does not belong to a horse, but to the ocean. Something great has broken inside of him, and it sinks, and sinks, and sinks until it hits, somewhere, at the bottom of his heart. He cannot sleep; Denocte sings to him in a language that he does not know, and it opens a yearning in his chest that cannot be answered. So, he wanders; he searches for the unfindable; he seeks to discover that has been lost, without knowing what it is that escapes him.
The Harvest Festival, from what he has seen during his visit, has left a lingering discontent in his soul. He misses the sun of his desert city, and wishes to return. He misses the way the water feels when it embraces him, when it pulls him over and promises forever. As beautiful as Caligo’s city may be, it reminds him too much of loss and not-belonging. He hears stories of the maze; Orestes has never seen one, or experienced one, or thought of one. But the idea intrigues him and he wonders if, perhaps, he will discover himself among the corn-stalks. His subconscious takes him there, tiredly.
When he arrives, however, the stalks are no longer of corn. He steps into a corridor of long, weeping flowers and only when one kisses his shoulder does he discover that they do not weep. They roar. Blood drips a line down his golden shoulder. He wonders if it is all a strange dream, but the blood tells him otherwise.
Orestes closes his eyes in the darkness and breathes the scents, listens to the sounds, and feels the air as heavy, heavy. It is iron and gold, like the weight of all the things that had once pushed him beneath the sea he loved. Yes. Those rusted flowers belong to gold nets, gold dust, all the things that can Bind a Soul. The memories are twisted things; fish in nets; blood spraying from a whale’s breath, brilliant crimson, caught in the sun like so many shattered rubies; falling from a black cliff-side, tangled in white and gold and black and grey until he did not know what shape he was, but in none of them could he fly.
Orestes opens his eyes and steps deeper, and deeper, into the maze. There is something aching here, something that aches like he aches; the steel stalks brush his flesh and he marvels at how they only sting, they do not burn. His mind is white with fear; white with the memory of what burnt flesh smells like as a sun is seared into his forehead with glistening gold paint—
He finds her.
He finds her and knows in a way he has always known hungry things intimately. Yes. Rage, to him, is a center. It is the thing that calls him back and says, you are the counter to every storm. Hunger and anger and discontent. He wants to say, if I could, I would transform into my ugliest shape tonight. He wants to whisper to her not-flowers, to her wicked things, I would be a kraken that would crush a ship, or a horse with shark teeth and skin like brine and kelp, or the great pod of orcas that stalks the whale calf indefinitely. I would be a Soul without a shape; I would be salt and rock and sea and this aching, empty longing for what cannot be.
He is not yet radiating light. His fear has kept it at bay; yes, his fear; yes, the ragged beatbeatbeatbeatbeat of a frantic heart that says, change, that says run, that says stay.
He stays.
Orestes whispers her dark shape, to the shadow of a horse and not a horse, “Caligo,” he names her goddess, he names her darkness. “Perhaps we could share some light.”
As Orestes says it, he thinks of every beautiful thing he has ever known. Solis is not here. Solis is far away. But there is a desperation to his actions, a necessity to his thoughts. Perhaps they are both drowning; perhaps light has never been so needed.
He thinks of the surface of the water as it rains softly, gently, and how time stops as he watches the droplets at eye-level, nearly becoming them. He thinks of Solterra’s sun, and the heat of the desert, and the lion that Chose him. He thinks of Boudika, when he set her Free. He thinks of the sound of singing, singing, singing in the sea, and then he thinks of rising, rising, rising, and saying enough to all the things that have ever promised harm. He thinks of Solterra's pride, and his once-people, his lost people, and how they had been everything.
Faintly, so so faintly, he begins to radiate light. It is muffled, star-like, as if they are both in a dream. It is as far as Solis can reach tonight, but Orestes knows.
Yes.
Orestes knows.
He breathes again,
and this time
it is enough.
