WE MEET NO ORDINARY PEOPLE IN OUR LIVES
Knowledge is its own kind of crown; and this white-splashed stranger wears it. There is something he knows, or something he wants to know, and Orestes cannot decide which one it is.
This is something in Orestes's short time in Novus that he has grown accustomed to. It will never matter what he learns, or how much he sweats for them, or even if he bleeds. There will always be a question mark curled around his name. Orestes? Orestes, the foreigner; the sun-shining prince; the usurper, the stranger, the non-native.
Orestes watches the stranger eat the bread, quietly; he listens to the quiet streets and does not further press the issue, or the conversation. He measures himself, despite the faint irritation he feels. Orestes cannot say why, but he does not believe this man to be of his court. His eyes are drawn again and again to the stranger’s winged heels; Orestes cannot make sense of them.
I was born here, he confesses.
Orestes listens with rapt attention; the raven roosts above them, and then takes flight again. There is the sound of a pulled cart somewhere, down a distant street.
Have you ever been anyone but Orestes?
He cannot help but raise a brow. “That is a very personal question to ask someone, when you still have not introduced yourself.”
Orestes decides not to hold it against him; there is something tense beneath the surface, something that promises a sort of catharsis, or at least admission. The desert gave me a name once. But I don’t remember it.
At first, the new Sovereign does not know how to answer the question. But for now, his memories are still fresh; and the magic blood of his homeland has yet to bleed from him. “Yes, and no.”
It is perhaps the only way to answer the question. He pauses for a moment; glances at the clear-blue, too-bright-blue, tragic-blue kind of sky. “I was born far from Novus to a land of warring people. Mine, so long as they stayed tied to the island, had eternal lives. I have been Orestes many times before.”
It used to be that he would say, and many times again.
But this time, he cannot. “But my people are all gone now. This is the one life I have left and so I will make use of it.”
However, the desert is so very different from the sea. Briefly, so briefly, he recollects what it used to feel like to swim with them, his beautiful, tragic people. The way that their movement was a melody more than an act; a sound or feeling more than an actuality. He wonders how long he will have those memories; if they will stay with him until the end, or be taken from him, one by one.
Orestes closes his eyes for a moment, brief, before opening them again. They do not express the sentiment he feels aside from in their profound depth, when he turns them upon the ankle-winged stranger.
“And you, desert-born? You have been more than one person, it sounds.” The comment might have been hard, if not for the smile that dances at the edges of his mouth, waiting to be born. Orestes adds, “What other lives have you lived, since the desert has forgotten you?”
It might have been cruel. But could it be cruel coming from a man who had been forgotten several times over? Orestes nearly apologises for his shortness; for his lack of tact. But he does not appreciate the interrogation from someone that does not even call Solterra home.
@Ipomoea
