AND YOU WAIT; YOU WAIT FOR THE ONE THING THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE, MAKE IT MORE THAN IT IS. SOMETHING WONDERFUL, EXCEPTIONAL, STONES AWAKENING, DEPTHS OPENING IN YOU. YOU THINK OF LANDS YOU'VE JOURNEYED THROUGH, OF PAINTINGS AND A DRESS ONCE WORN BY A WOMAN YOU NEVER FOUND AGAIN. AND SUDDENLY YOU KNOW: THAT WAS ENOUGH. YOU RISE AND THERE BEFORE YOU IN ALL IT'S LONGINGS AND HESITATIONS IS THE SHAPE OF WHAT YOU LIVED.
So I have a little piece of your heart, and you have a little piece of mine?
Orestes smiles, and the expression is the epitome of bittersweet. There are so many things he wants to say; wisdom he wishes to share; truth he wishes to utter. But matters of the heart are the most difficult to express; it has taken Orestes many lives to learn that it the one thing that cannot be persuaded. Everyone must reach their own beliefs of the heart. Everyone must find their own truths. And so he says, “If you would like a piece of mine, I would be glad to share it with you.” It is true; even as he says it he knows that she has one fragment already. “And if you give me a piece of yours, I will be sure to keep it safe. Not everyone will, though.”
There are few things he loves more than the intimacy between people. Aspara’s face comes alive with talk of her sister; ”You would be too, if you were me.” There is something bittersweet in that, too, Orestes thinks. But he laughs and the sound is as gentle as the shush, shush, shush of the sea. “I am very sure of that.” Yet, he wonders and fears if the brightness of one casts shade upon the other. He has known too many relationships where one shadows the other, rather than compliments them; where there is a necessity between the two that cannot be independent, that cannot grow freely, and so it grows gnarled together at the roots. Orestes does not say this, though.
Because it is also beautiful.
There is something whimsical about the way she says, oh, I will, as if there is nothing out of her reach. He should be surprised when she claims he is the Sovereign; but for some reason, Orestes is not. “Yes. It chose me.” And the lion is in his mind; and the voice of the desert is in him and through him, as faded as a dream. He does not say: and the sea abandoned me but he thinks it, when the high tide reaches his hooves and the warm lick of it is like the sting of betrayal.
Orestes does not dwell long on that, however. No. Not when the slight, magic girl that is almost-ocean tells him what the sand-dollar remembers. It was alive once… He closes his eyes when he listens, and almost says, everything in the sea is or was or will be again but does not.
“I think you have the best magic I’ve ever known.” Even as Orestes admits it, he wonders if it will become a curse for her. Are gifted children not so often cursed by the very thing that blesses them?
He tells her then, “It is far better than mine. One day, I will become a star.” The words are almost playful, and there is a curl to his lip that suggests his smile. As Orestes says it, he focuses on the warmth of the setting sun against his skin. Solis is distant, fading, as Vespara rises to meet him—but it is not too late… not too late, yet.
Orestes draws on the energy, on the memory, of light. His skin glows brighter, brighter, and the smallest of shells tremble about him from the earth. The sand dollar she has settled so gently rises to meet him and then swirls, whimsically, about his glowing body. The temperature of the air raises a degree, two, three, four, and he is bright enough he is nearly hard to see—faint sparks of light, bright and streaked like lightening, twirl in his main and tail and about his body among the floating shells and sand. Her mane and tail will likely tug about her body, toward the minute gravitational pull he has begun to produce… Orestes feels heavy, heavy, and if he wonders what it would feel like to collapse in upon himself, to sink beneath the sand—
Then the sun tips beneath the horizon, and he lets out a sigh. The display of magic ends abruptly. The shells settle peacefully back upon the sand, and his heart beats wildly in his chest. He can feel, even now, the tremble within him, the fluidity, that wishes to become another shape and he wonders just what it could be. “I would rather be able to talk to the world.” He admits.
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