I'm the hero of this story
I don't need to be saved
I don't need to be saved
He’d wondered, as he’d wandered, whether he was being watched.
It would not have surprised August at all to know he was - not when his home was the Scarab, which had eyes of one sort or another everywhere, and the halls were as thick with secrets as shadows but all of them found their way to him eventually. At first it was a game - every time he passed a mirror, or a portrait with an especially cold expression, or even the reflecting pools, he wondered if someone somewhere was observing him. But when nobody came for him, and none of the guards he passed did anything beyond watch him with the same intensity as the subjects of paintings, he let it go.
By the time he reached the garden and its marble pride he was too caught up in the other game, the game of discovery, to question whether anything saw him out of all those blank staring eyes. And between the birdsong, and the way the sunlight fell through all the myriad leaves like it was a living thing too, and the olive tree, he isn’t paying attention to the unnerving (and rather ostentatious) collection of lions at all.
Until one steps out from the foliage just beyond the tree, so that there is only a tangle and jut of roots between them.
Now it is August’s turn to freeze utterly, down to his breath. The lion is awful in the old-Testament sense of the word, beautiful and terrifying, and the first thought that comes to mind is So this is how I die. But the palomino is already pushing aside that cold ball of fear, because the setting is too beautiful, and he vaguely remembers Aghavni telling him Orestes had a lion companion, and the lion is asking him a question.
And if this lion is Solis or some other god, August remembers too well staring into the gaping, godless maw of a serpent-bear made of sand in an underworld dripping sap-or-blood to be afraid of any deity asking if he’s learned something.
“Yes,” he says, and lifts a brow even as he dips his chin, staring at the creature, hiding the way his heart still marvels at the wonder of him. “Not to drink before breakfast.” The lion’s eyes slide past him to something just beyond, and August turns to see it too, and so gets his first look at Orestes.
His first instinct is to swallow a laugh. Silver hair (carefully braided), gleaming golden skin with hints of silver dapples - they could be brothers, maybe twins. August has been jealous of Orestes since Aghavni left to join his regime; now, looking at him, he isn’t sure whether his envy is greater or less. Even their brows curve in mirror images.
“And yet here I am.” August is the first to smile, though he resents the way it feels like raising a sword to parry. When the king’s gaze falls to the tree, the palomino’s begins to follow, but the lion is too bright and August wrinkles his nose and goes back to studying Orestes.
He is surprised, a little, by what the sovereign says next. He could have asked about it then, or made some comment as to its beauty and that of the garden around it, the way it’s started to soften his heart to the Court. But the lion’s voice, all waves and wind and thunder, is still echoing like a widening ripple in his mind, and here is this man who looks so much like him, of a height, of an age, and yet (surely) in want of nothing. He feels the way he had when he came to far from the chaos and magic of the island, knowing he was not worthy of the Relic, whatever the Relic actually was.
So instead he only says, smiling affably, “It’s nice to know there are such venerable survivors of Solterra’s kings.”
@Orestes photo inspiration for this post here
