to feel that we exist, even though in pain
♠︎ ♕ ♠︎
If he is surprised to find himself face-to-face with they city’s new regent, August doesn’t show it. Instead he only steps back once she accepts the taper, wordless but watching as her gaze turns away. He wonders who those slim white candles represent: parents? Siblings? Friends or lovers or comrades, war or sickness? There have been many opportunities for loss in Novus of late. It is what marks them all as equals.
When she begins to light them he averts his eyes, watching others make their remembrances, some laughing and light, others somber. If he listens carefully, and when the music drops low, he can hear the drip of wax on the altars.
It is difficult not to wonder how closely they all came to winding up here, hunting that damned Relic. After the stories of all the deaths, he is still half-amazed that he and his loved ones emerged whole, and it makes his opinion of Novus’s gods no less murky than it had already been. And he - golden boy, who could wear a role as easily as a mask, capable and confident - had been found wanting. August hadn’t set out desiring the Relic, but now that it had been given to someone else (who?) it seems to sit at the corner of his thoughts the way it had the island.
It’s hard, then, not to think of collapse.
Her exhale brings him back. His silver-moon eyes shift to the regent again, smoke still drifting around her; she looks like an idol herself, foreign and sharp, something to pray to. August wonders what kind of prayers.
But though her eyes are sapphire-bright and her bones carved sharp and elegant and her hair falls in waves to the cobblestones she is still a woman here to remember those lost, and before he can decide better of it he reaches to touch her shoulder with the soft velvet of his nose. The gesture is brief, gentle, almost intimately so - as though she is Anghavni or Minya and not a stranger.
Then he’s leaning away, back into the smoke and starlight, his gaze still on her. “Can I buy you a drink, Regent?” August says softly. “To toast their memory.” And it isn’t clear whether he means those two flickering tapers, or the two before them, or every ghost that filled Denocte tonight.
@Antiope | <3
