FIRE-LIT, HALF SILHOUETTE AND HALF MYTH, THE WOLF CIRCLES MY PAST, TREADING THE LEAVES INTO A BED TILL HE SLEEPS, BLACK SNOUT ON EXTENDED PAWS. BLACK SNOUT ON SULPHUR BODY, HE NUDGED HIS WAY INTO MY CONSCIOUSNESS. THERE IS NOTHING THAT WON'T BE LIT UP IN THE DARK TORCH OF HIS EYES.
There is something changing in him. There is no one in Novus who knows him well enough (well, perhaps one person, but that in and of itself is a different story, one he has yet to understand, a girl named Boudika in Caligo’s Court who sings to the sea and dances dressed in ribbons). Anyways, it is not the same as the unknowing faces of his court, the tense hospitalities, the draining kindness that even now causes his heart to throb in his chest.
They do not know. They could not possibly know that at night he lay awake with a great roiling inside him, the roiling of monsters and fading memories, of a half-lived life. He is forgetting. If he had not been forgetting all along, then he certainly is now, and the black spaces of his memory are large and complete. It must be the vacuum of Novus’s magic at work; the way the Solar Deities strip from the inhabitants everything they’ve ever held before and now, yes now, they strip from Orestes’s his memories too. It had been happening all along; like a sleight of hand, he would discover a name opportunistically absent from his thoughts, or that the details of his imprisonment had become faded and inconsistent.
Now, however, the contrast is startling and obscure. He knew he had come from another land; but now Orestes revists his journals to recount the tales; the difference being is that was all they had become. Tales. They read like another man’s fables, disconnected, impersonal.
Orestes found himself more sullen than usual, more withdrawn. He busied himself with the activities of the Court and always, always presenting himself as he had been: charismatic, genuine, warm. Yet beneath this lurked a man with bloodshot eyes, who could not sleep for fear of forgetting more of the things that made him himself—
Whatever thoughts he would have had were interrupted by his telepathic bond with Ariel. She is here, your majesty.
Orestes had nearly forgotten Denocte’s Sovereign had sent a raven. This was uncharacteristic of him, and for a moment he was forced to steel himself. He clears his throat and rises from his study; it does not take him long to descend the slender staircase into the hall below, and walk to meet Ariel in the throne room. Sovereign and Sun Lion walk side-by-side as Orestes approaches the front; the guards have already let her in, and one stands nearby, weary and watchful as she admires the long hallway that marks the entrance of Solterra’s citadel. Orestes had commissioned a local artist to recreate the rich tapestries that lined the hallway, but the works were incomplete, and thus far only Solis’s creation decorated the walls.
““My apologies, Queen Antiope. I would have liked to meet you myself, but you know—" and Orestes cuts off with a supple, leonine shrug of his shoulders. She could end the sentence anyway she liked, but the meaning was implicit: there are always things to be done. ““To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit? I recognise Solterra is a difficult place to visit, and I thank you for the journey. Would you prefer to stay in the citadel, or have me guide you through the city itself?” Orestes nearly apologises; he is not tense, per se, but the light does not radiate from him as it usually does. There is something harder in his expression, something imperceptibly tighter. He is tired.
Ariel stretches languidly at Orestes’s side, yawning to expose the large incisors of a predator. The Sun Lion appraises Antiope with eyes the colour of burning gold but does not yet express an opinion one way or the other. Orestes, even after months of being bonded to the lion, finds the gesture unnerving. In a moment of uncharacteristic snappishness he says, “And please, m'lady, excuse the overgrown cat. We have yet to teach him manners." Ariel chuffs disapprovingly.
There is a moment during the interaction when Orestes wonders, briefly, what has become of Denocte's other Queen. The woman he had met in the maze, looking for a monster to fight, for something of flesh to sink her teeth into. A woman nearly god. Orestes almost asks, but decides against it. What is one more lost soul in a lifetime of hundreds of them?
You can never really save them, the thinks.
@Antiope || “speech”
"THE WOLVES HAVE
BEEN SLAUGHTERED
NOW, A HEDGE OF
SMOKING GUN BARRELS
RINGS MY DAUGHTERS
DREAMS"
BEEN SLAUGHTERED
NOW, A HEDGE OF
SMOKING GUN BARRELS
RINGS MY DAUGHTERS
DREAMS"
