a king walks among us
“Ah, how you make everything sound so beautiful.” She was poetry always; she breathed in the ugly beautiful world and breathed out Juniper, all wonderful things and kindness. To have found himself in a goddess’s embrace…that was not a fate El Rey could have imagined for himself. He should be hanging now, or headless and rotting, or otherwise cursed to be alone and hated. And he was hated, oh! How he was hated. But not by Juniper. So it was when she spoke of what he had done that his breath caught in his throat. The black bull of Solterra, of Denocte, of Raum’s court, could only be laid low by this woman, this one goddess woman.
I can see fatigue on your brow and wipe weariness from your skin. She said it as a commandment, a seer or saint or martyr or messiah speaking; and the Goddess spake: I wipe weariness from your brow.
”Do you know, then?” he asks, and it hurts him to do so. He does not want her to know. But if she does, she does, and she still loves him for it. Could a man be any more undeserving?
And as a pagan creature commands, so the vines drip from the roof of the world and wrap around them like necklaces, not nooses, but it crosses his mind.
”If you had no wings you would be able to send my troubles alight,” he says. ”I love you, Juniper. Tell me our future,” and let it be the one you deserve and that I share.
@
”in blood the blade, to its golden hilt, I’ll drown,“
I pledge you now, to death they all are bound,
