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
It is not a surprise, when she turns away from him. Orestes is expecting it; he is expecting it like one expects death, inevitable and eventual, but please, not right now, not this moment, but please, I thought I was ready, but I never will be—
Already she is gone. Already she has turn and run from him, the ocean shooting up in a fishtail spray with each long stride. Orestes watches her with dry eyes, because in this he knows, he knows he will never be able to say the right thing. He will never be able to do the right thing. It has taken him innumerable lifetimes to learn that sins are written more permanently than commandments; mistakes follow with the dogged determination of blood-oaths and sometimes, sometimes
There is no way to apologise.
There is no way to make it right, And he turns toward the sea after she is gone, after she has run far and fast, and he screams at the horizon; he screams until his voice cracks; he screams until his sides heave; he screams until his eyes turn the colour of molten gold and the sand whips picks up like a million small planets. He screams until his voice is nothing but broken air and his skin glows with the radiance of plasma, of lightening, and the ocean water evaporates where it touches his ankles.
Oh, it will never touch him with love again. Orestes falls forward onto his knees, his mouth barely above the water. There are starbursts behind his lids and eventually—he does not know how long, but the sun is gone and the sea is cold—Ariel finds him and says,
“Get up.”
Orestes thinks, I can’t
and somehow does anyway. With the numb acceptance of a man broken from shackles, free only in physicality; they know all their reasons for loving that freedom are gone, dead, forgotten.
They know the life they walk toward is one they had never been meant for, but must live regardless. And so Orestes walks. Away from the sea, following a lion that fills his mind with images of walking through fire.
You belong to something else now.
And still, always, always, he will have an ache where some cruel magic cleaved everything he had ever loved from him. Always, always, there would be a piece as integral as a limb gone, gone, gone, and the phantom memory would plague him, would dictate his hopes and fears, would remind him that nothing he did, no matter how selfless or grand, could pay for where he had failed.
