Into this wild Abyss/ The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave--/ Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,/ But all these in their pregnant causes mixed/ Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,/ Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain/ His dark materials to create more worlds,--/ Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend/ Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,/ Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith/ He had to cross
She cares. You don’t believe that. Look me in the eyes and tell me she cares. If she cared, why would she leave us to die on the land, like mortals? Why would she—
Whatever feeble optimism Orestes clung to about the sea, whatever misplaced romanticism he maintained about the mystic and beloved place of his forgotten birth—well, it is dashed by those words, as if upon paving stones. The words echo. Why would she leave us to die on the land, like mortals?
Orestes feels his own heart beat. He can hear the blood in ears and he can feel, in a way that unique to those who have lost their immortality, his own finite nature. He feels it in the way the breeze is too cold, the way there is nothing to comfort him against her dangerous, threatening proximity. Eye-to-eye, he notices the distinctive markings that he had not noticed before. Scar-like and silver, they hide within her half-winter coat, as if forgotten, as if hiding secretive and punitive.
There is a part of him that cows before him; yet it is small and overshadowed by the part of him that remembers being a prince, a king, now a Sovereign. Orestes’s lips peel back because he does know and her words have shaken loose something ancient within him.
“You’re right,” and Orestes’s voice is seething. If the sound were incarnated, transformed, it would be the Dead Sea on a raw-salt shore. “She has left us to die on the land.”
Orestes does not know why he says it, besides what he recollects from journals in looping handwriting, detailing a life that was once his but no longer feels like it. Yet the raw edge is still there, untouched and wounded. The raw edge is still exposed, fleshy, stinging.
She is salt in it. Unwritten, she remains a stranger; a stranger to him that is not a stranger at all, and by presence alone begins to tear bandages and sutures from half-healed wounds. Orestes pressed forward and in a gesture guileless and childlike, presses his nose against one silver tattoo, as if it did not so dangerously resemble his own.
“She would do it because we are unworthy.”
It is the only answer Orestes, once the Keeper of Souls, has left.
