do not weep, maiden, for war is kind
because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky
and the affrighted steed ran on alone
do not weep, for war is kind.
Perhaps, at another time, Orestes would have met Isra’s eyes and seen the sea still in them. Perhaps, if he were younger—if not so many lives had gone on without him—he would have smiled a sad sort of smile and said, I know what it feels like.
But they are opposites. The sea is his Bound—and nearly forgotten—soul. The desert is his godlike boiling, tumultuous blood. The desert is everything he had meant to do in another life, and never had the ability, the power, to complete. The light that pours from the half-arcane, half-forgotten tattoos is the rage of a half-finished life.
But Orestes does not possess the same sensitivities he once had. Those loved-by-the-sea no longer speak his language, nor he theirs. He recognises only enough of it so that when he levels his gaze and smiles a smile gleaming and brilliant he is not surprised to see the lost queen of Denocte, the queen who left to wage a foreign war.
Lead on she says with an almost-smile. Her mythic dragon lands atop a nearby rooftop and Orestes glances at the great beast, a beast he can vaguely—as if through many dreams—remember once having the magic to become. Ariel looks on, too, before sliding into the darkness before the Sovereigns of past and present. The glow of the Sun Lion reflects across the chasm and illuminates the depth of the catacombs within. They stretch so far that one cannot see where they end—only darkness, and more darkness, so readily swallowing the light.
Orestes wonders what has brought her back. The story, of course, had reached him—the queen of Denocte sailing away with her close family to fight a war. He wonders if she will ever tire of fighting such fights. He wonders, too, if she has visited Solterra if only to ensure he is not, in fact, another monster.
For one of the few times in his life, Orestes has a lack of things to say. It may very well be due to their distance, and the haunted encounter that remains in his mind, as she transformed a maze of flowers and grass into a maze of terrors; as he witnessed the anger welling in her soul like a storm at sea, all lightening and hate and reckoning.
Eventually, Orestes settles on discussing the catacombs.
“An earthquake revealed them.” He gestures to the rows of tombs to either wall as they walk into a more open chamber. They are narrow, more like shelves than a proper place of rest. Considering the Solterrans burn their dead, the ghastly and cobwebbed bones seem particularly haunting. “There was an entire group of soldiers imprisoned down here, during Zolin’s reign. One of them had time magic that kept them from ageing, growing thirsty, starving. While time moved on above the catacombs undisturbed, down here it remained a perpetual loop. They emerged and believed we were still warring with Denocte over precious metals.” He smiles a sad kind of smile, one that recognises the scars on her hips and remembers in a way that is all feeling and no fact the way it felt to war, and war, and war for a hundred lives.
“Anyways, this first chamber of the catacombs appears to be entirely within the last few decades. Our scholars are discovering many of those who went missing during Zolin’s reign and identifying them. They are being returned to their families so they may burn the bodies properly. But… the deeper one ventures, the less recognisable the chambers become. They are saying doors and tunnels have been revealed everywhere from Elatus, to the Mors, to the edge of the sea.” He thinks of his own experience in them. He remembers the crystal sarcophagus and bones so old they turned to dust.
“Although, I must admit, I have yet to venture very far. They’ve only been recently revealed.” Ariel continues to pad before them, bright enough it hurts the eyes to look directly at him. The rows of shelf-like tombs seem endless. “Strange, isn’t it, all the things that are dormant beneath us? Things we might never discover.”
Orestes, in the caverns where Solis does not reach, is cool gold and silver. The ornate tattoos do not gleam so brightly, here, but there is that consistent glow of his magic from within that burns like an ember beneath his skin, in his center. At long last he glances at her, with eyes that are old in a young man’s face, with an almost-smile at their edge. He asks, “Tell me, Isra. Do you love the sea?”
The longer he looks, the more he sees it in her. The more she reminds him of it.
And the longer he is here, the less it becomes him, with his ornately braided hair and desert-toned skin. He is Solterra, now.
Yes.
He is Solterra, and Solterra is him.
Ariel glances over his shoulder with sun-bright eyes, knowing. If that is what Isra is here to learn, Orestes hopes she sees it.
"Orestes." || "Ariel." || @Isra || ooc: please excuse my characters who are incapable of short replies
swift, blazing flag of the regiment
lion with crest of red and gold
