« don't die so far from the sea »
He looks at her and thinks of broken glass.
Beautiful, and a little tragic.
The mahogany mare pushes past what politeness requires. His skin jumps where she touches him; but he does not flinch away.
No.
Her touch ought alarm him; it ought make him shift from her, displeased and taken aback.
Instead;
The heat of her flesh against his is the ringing of a gong; it is a sound that fills the hollowness of his soul, and he nearly sighs.
Nearly.
Orestes turns his face away from her. He thinks he should pray.
He doesn’t.
And his teeth taste like the sea.
No. Her breath, against his cheek. They are nearly eye-to-eye. Among his people it would almost be a threat; but from her he does not see it as such. The nearness evokes in him the visceral instincts of a land he means to forget. Does she not know? He wants nothing more than to become a suggestion of a shape; disembodied; one creature that is in fact a part of many. He has forgotten what it feels like to not be alone.
He hears the song. He hears it, and the hot air beneath a hawk’s soft wings. The mortality trembles in his eyes; old eyes; nearly god eyes. There is a line of white across her face; a lightening bolt; a haphazard and hesitant marking from another world, another time, and it is his turn to reach out and trace it with his lips.
Then, his hot breath against the brilliant amethyst that dangles, just so, beneath her corkscrew horn.
“Something old.” He does not say someone. He steps away from her, and like that, the hollowness within him resounds, resounds, resounds and he is nothing but an abyss.
It is as if she is peeling his new identity away from him,
as the hawk above wheels away, and all signs of life vanish from them.
Orestes closes his eyes a moment. He thinks:
Don’t you know? I am only playing at being a man—don’t you know,
I still dream of what it was like to be anything and everything, to be the sire and the spawn, the sea and the salt.
He feels as if he does not have to tell her that for her to understand the way her lupine call still fills every corner of his soul with cruel longing. He asks, "And what magic has abandoned you?"
Because, when he looks at himself,
he thinks of broken glass.
@Thana / speaks / notes: text text
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