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
A quiet part of him wants to say
it is all just sand.
The pain. The sorrow. The rage.
Especially that one.
The rage.
He wants to take her palpable anger and turn it into the sun. He wants to say, rage, rage as dying things do, but do not die. He wants to say that if she is like the sea one day she will understand the pain never ends; there is just life and death and the eternal span between that is still, somehow, finite. He has seen a people eradicated. He has fought genocide. He has lost, and he opens his mouth to speak, to say, it isn’t fair, but he does not. He does not, because when he closes his eyes he remembers horses of stone, and the fear that has browbeat his people, and the way the desert is tired. He wants to say it isn’t fair. He has heard many stories of Isra, some rumours, some perhaps true. A Queen who was a slave, perhaps. A transformer who changes reality to illusion; or illusion into reality. A victim of Raum; a saviour of a city. He wants to ask her, where do you hurt?
But the answer is one he is not ready to hear.
And he cannot rob her of her rage.
To ask is childish. Assumptive. Perhaps even cruel.
A part of him opens up like a flower; a part of him is wounded and dying; a part of him is a bird that cannot fly in a cage, singing, singing, at the sky. He looks at her and there is something timeless in it, something aching, a hollowness that offers this is what is left when the rage is gone. He wants to tell her. He wants to tell her that nights in darkness do not help. He wants to tell her solitude is the worst medicine. He wants to say that nothing drowns out the hurt, the past, that it is forever a poignant shard lodged in the livings’ lungs. His eyes are bright, but they do not glow—they are the colour of the sea beneath the stars, and Orestes thinks:
He was once the sea, and even being that could not rob him of his rage. Even that could not save Orestes from his cursed mortality; it could not breathe the magic back into him or the life back into his people. He was once the sea, and that did not save him. It simply taught him the finite. It simply reminds him, again and again, the smallness of his suffering. I will take everything from you, his mother might have whispered, had she the courtesy. But Orestes did not even get that, her failed Prince, her sinful son.
You won’t get out that way, she tells him. Her flowers become revitalised, but she does not move to follow him. Instead, she opens a path back toward the city that falls with the musical patter of rain and breaking glass. It is red as blood and bright as hope. He looks at it, and then back to her, even as she turns from him.
“If…” it is a quiet acknowledgement, a boyish, nearly flirtatious possibility. If. But he steps toward her pathway and the bonfires of her distant city, hesitantly, haltingly.
Orestes wants her, desperately, to come with him. He hears the dragon roar and thinks of all the nights the sea whispered dark and terrible things to him as Boudika slept. He closes his eyes for a moment, and there is only darkness, and he remembers what it felt like to drown. He says, “And I, Isra of the Night, will always love the sea.” He sighs; it is a heavy thing leaving him. There is no threat. It is an admission; a truth; pained and real and earnest.
Orestes steps forward, and forward again; the rubies and diamonds shift beneath his hooves, and the sound is still that of breaking glass. “It would lead you back as well.”
He is not worried about death beneath Caligo’s dark stars. He is not worried about it in strange magic of Isra’s twisting maze. He does not fear for his court tonight; not beneath a blanket of so much pain and wrath. In his mind he remembers the sun and the brightest gold of the Mors’ sand; the red of the canyons; the blue, blue of the sea. He continues down the path she has opened for him and decides some days it is better for the monster to burn.
Perhaps, on a day when it has burnt out, he will tell her that Solterra does not see her as a monster. That the desert might have breathed out as a sleeping dragon would, and dreamt, thank you, thank you, thank you. Perhaps one day he would tell her that he does not fear death, because he has already died.
But Orestes stops. He stops, and he looks behind him. He looks to see if she is still there. "You should be angry, Isra of Denocte. It isn't fair. It isn't right. None of it is, and you should be angry. It never will be. Raum. He was a monster I am glad I didn't meet and I am sorry I did not stop."
And in his heart he remembers falling from a black cliff when just before hope had been a dove in his heart, white and innocent. And in his mind he thinks of how painful the crash was, how betrayed he had felt, how the name of Vercingtorix followed him all the way into the sea and beyond. In his heart he remembers the moment he failed and how always, always, it would rot inside him like a cancer. How it would bring to mind a searing hatred, even as the magic faded, even as his colours changed, even as he fought for a new people. A part of him would always be angry.
Orestes turns away. He keeps walking.
