Two Travelers were walking along the seashore. Far out they saw something riding on the waves.
"Look," said one, "a great ship rides in from distant lands, bearing rich treasures!"
The object they saw came ever nearer the shore.
"No," said the other, "that is not a treasure ship. That is some fisherman's skiff, with the day's catch of savoury fish."
Orestes mind is not on the death around them; it is on the way that as they enter the catacombs, the light abandons them. It drains from his tattoos like an animal slaughtered; it drains from his being as if it has never existed, at all. Ariel, more omnipotent than he will ever be, keeps the absolute at bay—but barely, just so, with a throbbing ember-like glow that pulsates and pools around them against bones and decay and rusted weapons. He watches the fringes of the light against the dark rather than Isra—but perhaps watching that is the same as watching her.
A battle older than time. The stars against the endless abyss. Beating, fragile hearts against the finite world around them. Live, live, live says the echo of their blood. And the skulls around them say, I am coming, and I will always be sooner than you expect. Isra’s voice breaks the silence Orestes’s allowed to grow, after his introduction to the catacombs.
Strange is not the word I would have chosen for this.
Her fury is nearly palpable; but rather than transform the catacombs around her into something even more dangerous, they bloom with flowers dusted in diamond. It is to Asterion Orestes said, Strength is its own kind of weakness. It is with Asterion and Isra’s own daughter he had thought, we all give pieces of ourselves until there is nothing left to give.
He bears witness to Isra as she carves another pound of flesh out of her heart, an offering to a world that will never stop bleeding. Where are the soldiers now?
Orestes wants to ask, does it matter?
He doesn’t. The question is cruel; edged with Solterra’s hard pride, and tendency toward apathy. Perhaps it is Ariel who taught Orestes that, the first time Orestes felt him kill a fawn through their bond.
It was my teeth at the soft thing’s throat.
Except it hadn’t been.
Does it matter?
“Some awoke disoriented. Many are unaccounted for. A handful awoke with their mind’s gone. Many more will never wake up at all.”
They are hard, pragmatic truths.
This woman makes him feel heavier than any he has ever known before; she makes him feel as heavy as the see had, so many years ago. In this body, Orestes thinks, he had almost been in Novus longer than he had been in his homeland. But he remembers, in the way one remembers a phantom limb: all the Souls he had been meant to save, all the Souls who were in his charge and were not lost not to the sea, but to violent men. The sun at his brow aches. The sun at his brow is a vivid reminder that he, too, is Bound.
“And why is that, Isra?” She smells like salt and a little like death. After all, the sea always smells a little like death. Then:
“Did you defeat the monster you sailed across it to find?”
The rumours always fly far and wide. Even when they sound like stories, Orestes believes them. Even when they sound like long-lost fables, or fairytales, or things too like myth to be real.
How can he not, in a world where he is a star and she is the sea, and there is a lion older than the desert leading them through the agony of men?
Perhaps he is naive for being reminded of something of himself, in her. In her fury. In her bloodied desire for justice. It reminds him of a hundred lifetimes ago, when his land was first punished by the arrival of foreigner.
He had lived a hundred more fighting that same foreigner.
And now he knows the story because he reads what he had written in half-mad haze months and months ago, and it reads as if it belongs to another man. Orestes walks past her, nearly brushing shoulders, pressing deeper into the tunnel.
"Orestes." || "Ariel." || @Isra
Still nearer came the object. The waves washed it up on shore.
"It is a chest of gold lost from some wreck," they cried. Both Travelers rushed to the beach, but there they found nothing but a water-soaked log.
