WE ARE NOT
WHO WE USED TO BE
The garden is full of lions.
They are made of large, yellow marble slabs; carved and polished. Some are lost to the overgrown foliage; others peak above or around garden plants, heads or eyes half-obscured, a haunch visible through the bursting bougainvillea or mandevilla vines; mesquite and sagebrush; agaves and desert marigolds. They guard the gates, they adorn the parapets. They are mere ornaments, carved years ago and reinstated after rediscovery in some half-forgotten basement. Many are life-sized or bigger, remnants of a dynasty in which their living brethren reigned like feral kings, Solis’s wild priests. They stare on with lifeless marble eyes at the golden trespasser; apathetic. Does he not seem as if he belongs, burnished as if by Solis himself?
Yet one pair of eyes open at the telltale clip-clop of hooves upon the flagstone path. Luminescent and sun-bright they flick after the stallion as he passes by. First, Ariel assumes it is Orestes; until he almost immediately discerns the sheer impossibility of his bonded catching him unawares. Feather-soft, the Sun Lion rises from his garden alcove to stalk through the foliage after the stranger; his paws knead at the gravel and rich soil, freezing utterly with each backward flick of the stallion’s ear. Ariel does not recognise him and his unsettles the lion; more than that, it enrages him. There should be no one he does not recognise within the castle.
Orestes, Ariel calls softly through their bond. There is a stranger in the garden.
A stranger in the garden.
The Sun Lion pads further, further; he loops around the olive tree where the palomino pauses, admiring the ancient center-piece. The stranger laughs aloud, almost mockingly, shakes his head, and then proceeds to continue staring. Ariel does not know how long he remains hidden in the darkness beyond the tree, a pair of eyes peering through heaps of Mexican feather grass, jade trees, and bursting Texas sage. Just his eyes; just the almost-white teardrops that streak alongside the nose to his chin; just the shapeless shape of a predator in the long stalks of his desert home.
Eventually, Ariel rises from his hidden place; eventually, Ariel rises like the feral king he is and steps beyond the thorns and brilliant colours of the foliage; it snags at his mane, pricks at his side, but the lion remains undeterred. At last the half-mythic beast speaks. “Have you learned something?” Ariel’s voice is thunder, or bass, or the crash of the sea, the desert whipping in a storm.
He has only risen because Orestes is here now. He has only risen because the Sovereign strides down the same flagstone path his doppelgänger (albeit with virgin skin) had, a steady clip-clop. When he reaches the center of the garden, unhurried and with beautifully, ornately braided hair, he only arches his brows. “You are awfully deep within the citadel of Solterra to be lost.”
Yet Orestes’s tone is noncommittal, unreadable. He speaks like a scholar observing a fact of his book. After a moment, with his head lifted toward the cutting blue sky above, Orestes lowers his gaze to the gnarled, ancient tree and says, “It captivates me as well.”
Ariel slinks to rest at its base; a living lion in a garden of stone. He radiates light, a light too bright to stare at, simply out of spite.
@August || “Ariel” || “Orestes”
