there is no turning back a reversed name; a reversed curse. i will follow you to the depths of the sea, to the cold caves and caverns where the sun does not shine and iridescence rules.
Today, Orestes looks like a Sovereign.
The doe-eyed prince, so accustomed to loving the world, wears the face of a warrior-king. His head is high and his mane not the typical windswept, disheveled crown. Today it is ornately braided; it loops down his neck beautifully, orderly. Whatever remains of the half-wild boy in love with the sea… well, the palomino has locked those remnants away. For the first time in all of his lives, and certainly this life, he has washed the sea-salt from his skin. Orestes smells of herbal white sage and desert sagebrush; sweet, heady Indian tobacco; Saguaro cactus and prickly pear jam; the heat of baking sand, smoke, dry wood.
Orestes smells like the sun baking the dunes; like his city streets; and this is how he walks into Delumine’s capitol, as clean and new as a risen sun. His tattoos glow faintly in the bright midday light; the spring breeze wafts cool and reminiscent of winter beneath a sky that is so blue it burns to look at. He brings the scent of Solterra with him; he brings everything Solterra is. The pride is evident in his expression; the fierce and nearly vindictive survivalism. Ariel walks beside him, a lion that reaches the shoulder of his fifteen hand companion. His head, although not quite level with Orestes, drifts at chest-level. Magnificent and nearly mythical, the Sun Lion appraises the Rapax River over the edge of the Dawn Court’s wall. He has never seen so much water in his life, aside from the sea, and regards it with mild curiosity.
Orestes has yet to visit the Dawn Court; he is impressed to see the lush greenery outside the district walls, and to admire the spires burgeoning from the Court’s towers. Where Solterra is smooth sandstone and golden stucco, Delumine is brick and mortar, aggressive ivy that deepens the apparent age of the buildings, that brightens everything to emerald. Delumine seems bright, promising, blooming with springtime flowers. Small birds—finches, sparrows, a cardinal or two, perhaps a mockingbird, perhaps more—flutter and sing overhead. Orestes takes his time reaching the capitol building where the Sovereign keeps. Dawn Court citizens occasionally stop to glance curiously at the Solterran and his lion companion; but no one stops him until he reaches the fortress itself and informs the guard, standing watch, that is there to visit with their Sovereign.
The atmosphere here is different. The humidity burns off his too-hot desert-bright skin. His tattoos twist and glow; the rocks gravitate and fall at his passage. A different Orestes, an Orestes with the sea breeze in his dreams and the memory of a thousand shapes in his soul, would have raised his head to the sky and taken in the beauty of it. He would have admired the differences. Today, however, he looks at them with something close to contempt. Today, however, he sees them as what they are; separation; injustice; an allotment of life's black-ice, unexpected chance or privilege of what-have-you. He sees Delumine's green and river and the sound of songbirds and he thinks, life is so much easier here, for you. But even that hard-edged judgement takes on a note of pride.
And anyways, his path was not so meandering as one might have thought. Although he wandered a little aimlessly through the streets, through the markets, even pausing to listen to an artisan play a lute... all along he has been heading toward the capitol. Orestes's arrival is unexpected, unannounced. But the policy of surprise is one that he sees strengths to, even if it is not diplomatic. It has taken him many months to discern the white-and-bay man who met him in the streets of his city when he was a new Sovereign… well, is he not Delumine’s own?
The taste has left a bitter one on Orestes’s tongue. He waits patiently at the gate, his eyes following up a twist of ivy that reaches the uppermost spire, a green assault against the sky. Ariel says nothing but stretches long and catlike. Then, in the silence through their bond, thinks:
I don't like the humidity.
Orestes glances at him side-long and almost, almost smiles.
