YOU ARE A GOLDEN THING
IN A HEAVY, HEAVY WORLD
IN A HEAVY, HEAVY WORLD
You are alone.
Everything you’ve ever read doesn’t tell you that. It doesn’t read the way it feels; or the way it watches. No; you can’t romanticise the loneliness,, but somehow when people do talk about it, they make the sacrifice noble. What people see is this: pride, and brilliance, and charisma. Leadership. They don’t tell you in stories, or fairytales, that at the end of the day the decision is always yours, and the duty will forever be upon your shoulders, and you make those weighted decisions alone. There is no legend that describes how there are a thousand and one moments the hero nearly reaches out, nearly speaks up, to say that this is too much, he cannot bear it.
They didn’t tell me that when I became the Prince of a Thousand Tides. They didn’t tell me the way it feels like to let go of everything for someone else, to become more than just a person. An ideal; a vision.
Do you understand that? I am not a prince. I am the Prince, through no account of my own.
This is what happens:
You stop sleeping at night
Your heart aches, aches, aches.
You dream of love and know that only the lucky, the privileged, deserve it. (You think of how everyone deserves that happiness but you; because your heart belongs to the People, and the People can’t share their keeper, their guardian, their symbol.)
But People don’t know the weight. They don’t know how fiercely you love, and how utterly you suffer. They do not realise the extent which you will go to sacrifice yourself for their benefit; the hours; the weeks; the days; the months; the years; even the lifetime.
I have lived so many lives with this weight; and I know why the sea chose me. She is in me, and I am in her, in the way that her waves are deep and dark and endless. Only something tragic can contain such multitudes and I know this because I have felt the way she sings at night, when we are alone.
Yet, it is my privilege to bear their burden. It is. I would not trade it for the world. But you must understand… there are days it would be nice, for just a moment, to have your heart held by someone else. To be told, once, everything will end up fine.
Even if it is a lie.
Journal Entry of Prince Orestesiahzrah’Zanrekiah’reta’Mournansuin, the last Prince of the Khashran, lost to the sea.
He dreams the words and by the time he wakes, they aren’t real. Just a memory of a feeling; just the sentiment of loss, of searching, for something misplaced but insignificant.
Orestes has found himself dozing at his work table; his face is pressed against one of Zolin’s salvaged journals; he has been searching for an answer to… to… Orestes doesn’t remember.
He stands up and goes to the window, drawn by something he cannot explain. But the setting sun casts a glare that is impossible to see through, and he returns to his work, attempting to remember what he had been searching for.
Orestes is tired.
A bone-deep tired.
He hears footsteps below; it must be one of the courtiers, perhaps Charles. His eyes are closed and he is leaning his forehead against the cool glass window that faces the sea. That is how he stands, when Marisol enters.
Orestes does not realise it is her. He opens his mouth to say something to Charles, and stops dead when she begins to speak. Forgive me. Orestes turns. His eyes find her and his heart swells; no, he thinks. No, this is all wrong—this is not the way he is meant to hear her, this is not the way he wanted to make her sound. He turns to face her but refrains from stepping forward. He had overstepped last time—
I should not have turned you away. I… did not want to.
And in his head he remembers the expression on her face.
He had hurt her.
Marisol will not meet his eyes; that, too, is something he can hardly bear. But for some reason his voice is caught—he does not want to say the wrong thing. There is something in her expression, apologetic though it may be, that reminds him of a bird about to take flight, or a deer about to flee.
She steps forward, and Orestes is still unsure if this is a dream. “Forgive me, and I will tell you all the love poetry I know, forever.”
His voice is petal-soft when he says, “Oh, Marisol.” Orestes steps forward, at first hesitant, and then with confidence. It is only to drape his head over her neck and pull her into an embrace; tentative, gentle, as close to a question as a physical touch could be. “There is nothing for you to apologise for.”
Orestes pulls back; it is only to look her in the eyes. “Forgive me,”, he says. “I… it was too much, too soon.” Orestes’s heart is fluttering in his chest; the gentle swish, swish, swish of wings in his veins. His head feels light; his tongue is dry. He feels more nervous, more hesitant—but it is only because he cannot stand to make the same mistake twice.
He says, “I understand… I do. I know what it is like to have the weight of the world on your shoulders. I know how there isn’t much room for… this in a world like that.”
Orestes wants to give her something, but he had not been expecting company. The room is growing dark without a lantern lit; and the stacks of books remind him of their first interaction. Orestes is shy, uncertain. “I… I ought to have been more patient. And I wasn’t. I was… tactless… and… and… I had so many poems I wanted to share that night, and I didn’t.”
He has no eloquence; not in this moment; not full of surprise and awe and the fragile, impossible hope. “I… can I get you anything?”
Orestes turns away, for a moment, as if to find her something. But Orestes stops. He turns back toward her, and his eyes seek out hers in the dim, fading light. It is her god that is here between them; it is her god, taking hold of the sky, and casting a thin veil of blue light. Orestes’s cannot help but think, for a moment, that she makes even sadness look beautiful. He cannot help but think it is not his light, but her own, radiating from her expression in a form of vulnerability and regret uncommon for a commander, a queen.
“Not one word,” he whispers. It is not possible for blue eyes to smoulder like flame; but somehow, his do. “, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget…”
Perhaps, this poem at least, will not go unfinished.
@
"SO EDEN SANK TO GRIEF
SO DAWN GOES DOWN TO DAY
NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY"
SO DAWN GOES DOWN TO DAY
NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY"
