tie up
the lines
because Ishot
the albatross.
But I have
weathered
worse
storms
than this.
the lines
because Ishot
the albatross.
But I have
weathered
worse
storms
than this.
Solis is far from here.
The darkness does not become Solis's favoured son; instead, the colour black rests like a too-large coat upon his shoulders, the cloak of a patriarch and not a boy. There is a hard edge to him in the night that is typically softened by the light of the sun, or the starlight of the too-large desert sky. The luminescent markings of his skin do not radiate their typical heat and light; instead, they resemble the precise colour of a knife’s edge, quicksilver and sharp.
In such a setting, it is not so difficult to imagine Orestes as he had once been: a shape-changer, a flesh-eater, a magic man, Prince of a Thousand Tides.
He wanders far from that life now, too. The discontent of his past roils like a ferocious thing, a starved thing. He is hungering in the woods of Delumine, aimless and uncertain. Orestes does not even understand how he has reached the river and as he stares at its bank, he wishes to take the plunge; he knows the water would take him, eventually, to the sea. If only he could find a way to become the current, to caress the waves…
It is the scattering of deer that alert him to something amiss; the strange, predatory chill that follows. He turns his eyes upriver and sees a striking silhouette. Ariel is somewhere in his mind, somewhere in the distance, and that distance is closing now. Orestes… the Sun Lion warns, but it is already too late. Orestes turns toward the strange silhouette, drawn by a longing he cannot place or name, drawn by a necessity, a want—
When she nickers he knows.
Orestes lips twitch around his teeth.
He feels her rot. Her decay. The closeness to death.
Oh, he has felt it so many times before—
Orestes lips twitch around his teeth; they pull back, drawing into a ghastly shape that remembers not the blunted molars of his new life, but something sharp, something wicked. He presses the blunt of his tongue against them. There is a nicker in the back of his throat, but the Sovereign does not succumb to the urge.
He lets the silence settle. He lets it reign.
He gives the silence it’s due.
Then he answers her with a wailing, screaming keen; the sound of a creature gutted; the sound of something dying. Ariel starts from the underbrush, but the question he would asked is never uttered. The wail continues and then cuts as sharply as it had begun.
Hello, old friend. Orestes never stopped walking. He is near enough to recognise her to the fissure-fractures of her skin, to the gleaming amethyst above her eyes, to the spiral of her horn.
He should not be here; after all, it is trespassing. He knows it. She knows it. But Orestes merely regards her, ghostlike and ancient, before he steps into the steeped pool of decay at her hooves, the stagnated water, the decay, decay, decay—
Orestes says, “If I could write a poem,” his voice does not sound like his own. “‘I would write about the forest in winter and the way everything is dead and we call it sleep...'” Orestes quotes her, the memory as fresh in his mind as if the conversation had been the day before…
But now it is night, and he stands in her dead river thinking of his dead self, wondering at what the end of this new life holds, and he cannot help but say: “If I were to write a poem tonight, it would be about how the sea is full of the dead.”
The words emerge before he can help them. There is a strange stiffness to his voice, and Orestes continues: “It would be a poem of how some of us do not deserve the sun.” How it has been branded into me, a Mark of Cain.
