in the garden
i will die
i will die
H
e thinks he can see the desert - when he squints his eyes and tilts his head and peers at the hazy horizon line. He knows it’s there, just out of reach, hiding on the other end of the plains. Somewhere, all this gently waving grass gave way to desert dunes, to rolling white sand that sang out at night when no one was around to listen. Behind him were the trees of Viride.
He stood there staring at another world, while the light faded all around him, knowing he should return to sleep beneath the canopy of his home.
And yet -
And yet, there was something daring about being here in the open, just out of the boundary of his court’s land (your land, the trees whispered still to him, reaching out their branches as if to pull him back to them, don’t forsake us yet.) There was something exciting about doing something he knew he shouldn’t, as he began to wade through the sea of grass and distance himself from the forest. There was something that felt inherently right to him, as he made his bed in a field full of flowering larkspur and bluestem, where the trees were nothing more than a dark line to his west, and the desert nothing more than a pale horizon to his east.
Beneath a sky wider than any he had seen before - with no moon around to drown out the light of the stars - he slept not as a sovereign, but an orphan.
There’s a voice in the sun - I can hear it, warning me, watching me. Perhaps it is laughing, too, I would understand if it did. A part of me wants to laugh, to cry, to beat my hooves against the ground even as I stand quietly, stand tall, stand proud in their midst.. I feel like a colt again, and I can’t forget, won’t forget, the way I was left to die by the same feral people who circle me now like coyotes closing in on their prey.
This is wrong, it should feel wrong.
But I smile.
And I take the spear that is offered to me, and I let them paint my cheeks red, and drape a pelt lined with teeth and claws around my shoulders. "This was your mother’s," an old woman tells me, her face sun-tanned and lined, as she ties a leathern pouch around my neck. Was. It presses against my chest, but I do not ask her what’s in it. I already know without asking it will be something important, something I will need.
I can sense another scarred woman at the edges of my vision, lurking just out of sight, darting away every time I look in her direction. But I know it’s her, without needing to see her face. It’s always her, the girl who dances between the dunes. She had promised to dance with me, once; before she had any scars, before her skin turned white and brittle like bones left too long in the sun. And tonight, I know that I will dance alone.
"It is time," they whisper, a hundred voices that are as dry as the desert sand beneath our hooves. “I am not your king," I tell them, but even I do not sound sure about that. My brother bares his teeth and laughs, and the sound of it makes me want to laugh alongside him, laugh at myself, at who I used to be. "Don’t you know," he tells me, as the others fall away and he pushes me towards the Mors, towards the desert that is waiting for me, "That you would have ended up here eventually?"
I did know; I knew it every time my hooves touched the sand, every time the sun felt hot against my back. That boy who had stolen away from the desert had only ever been buying himself time, time that would one day run out.
Today was that day. Today I would hunt.
Today I would become the man I had denied. And if I died instead, I would die knowing they would burn my body.
@Dune "speaks" notes
