AND A GOOD SOUTH WIND SPRUNG UP BEHIND; THE ALBATROSS DID FOLLOW, AND EVERY DAY FOR FOOD OR PLAY, CAME TO THE MARINER'S HOLLO! IN MIST OR CLOUD, ON MAST OR SHROUD, IT PERCHED FOR VESPERS NINE; WHILST ALL THE NIGHT, THROUGH FOG-SMOKE WHITE, GLIMMERED THE WHITE MOONSHINE
Your blood perhaps, if it suits you. But not your body.
There is a stark contrast of light and dark, life and decay. Ariel burns, and burns, and burns and Thana’s teeth at Orestes's cheek are a memory and a searing pressure. He has been here before and it feels, strangely, as if he will be here again. Perhaps he will be here endlessly, suspended in a moment that feels as hollow as everything he was meant to become.
He could never could have imagined himself in a river with no salt, with only dreams of the sea, yet there is none of it left in him. Only sand, and the running of an hourglass.
Not this. And her teeth claim the flesh just above his heart. He closes his eyes and the thing that floods him is not relief, but remorse.
Ariel’s light wanes. The Sun Lion dims the violent glow and watches cautiously, apprehensively, the two horses. An older part of him, archaic and beyond the language of mortals, understands what Thana is by knowing the nightmare of her bonded. There is a delicate tension, however, that Ariel does not wish to disturb—and so he watches in the renewed concern, a glint of polished gold in the darkness.
Orestes pulls away from Thana at the same moment Ariel quits burning, stepping forward and up into the current. It buffets his legs; it rushes against his chest and washes from him the imprint of her teeth at his chest, the memory of their feel. Yet the memory of it lingers in the way an echo might, fading even as its heard, dissipating even as its felt.
“Why do you stay among us?” he asks at last. He does not look at her. He stares up the river and wonders where the source of it might be; he wonders if he followed it far enough, if any memory of the sea would fade and he would be left with clear mountain springs. Orestes asks it as if she has a choice; Orestes asks it as if there is somewhere else she might go.
And that night, far from the sun, far from his Court, he thinks if there were a chance he might go as well, if she were to extend a metaphorical hand, if she were to say because I have been waiting for you to be ready to leave and for a moment, brief, aching with a tremendous burden... he would. Orestes would slough the world from his shoulders as Atlas never had and say enough, enough, enough. Orestes is in his inaction provokes Ariel into action; the Sun Lion wades into the river and crosses it. His eyes, like small suns, are on Eligos. They burn and burn; and if the other feline is darkness incarnate, violence incarnate, suffering incarnate, Ariel is his opposite. Ariel is the guardian, the keeper, of the dunes; he is daylight and dreaming and nobility, the blood of warrior's, the golden center of what Solterra is meant to be. He draws his teeth back, dripping water; he feels the press of something tremendous, something unstable, and Orestes
is turning to look over his shoulder at the unicorn that reminds him of all the deaths he's died. He knows she is Dawn's Champion of Battle; when the word reached him there was nothing he could do but be surprised. She does not belong in this Court with it's greenery and kindness. There is something possessive in him, something that wants to say you belong with me in the desert, in a place that does not wilt at your touch. He doesn't say it, however, because he doesn't even understand why he wants to.
Instead in a voice as raw as bleeding flesh Orestes asks, "What do you do with the emptiness of knowing you will never belong?" Because he, too, no longer belongs. He, too, is rent open from everything he was meant to be and will never become. Another world away, everything he ever loved is broken, Bound, and Lost even to him, even to his memory, to his heart;
all that remains is an abyss.
A place, a scar, where there was once something
and now
nothing.
@Thana
'GOD SAVE THEE, ANCIENT MARINER! FROM THE FIENDS THAT PLAGUE THEE THUS--! WHY LOOK'ST THOU SO?' WITH MY CROSS-BOW, I SHOT THE ALBATROSS
