how willing you must be to kill angels
Every morning, Torix wakes up feeling inside out. There is a vulnerability, he thinks, to walking through the world with his insides on the outside. A heart on his shoulder, perhaps, or kidneys on the hips. There is a feeling, when he is Novus, that his skin is transparent and everything beneath it has grown black with rot.
His mind always, always returns to his mother. If you leave, she had said, you will only be running.
The memory is hot with rage; scalding, it burns him, again and again. He wasn’t running. How could she accuse him of that? Did she not understand he was here hunting, searching? There was something in Novus that belonged to him and, try as he may to forget it—and oh, that list is long, that list full of bodies he tried to lose himself in, fights he couldn’t win, lovers he couldn’t love—it persisted, demanded.
You would have been the youngest commanding officer in the history of Oresziah. They had told him, that. They had held his promotion ranks in a bed of red silk. Take them. Their yours. Everything in his life, it seemed, had been lined up so perfectly for the occasion. The war had been won, and—well, he would travel the seas and take it to new shores.
Vercingtorix walks along the shore in pre-dawn, when the sky is a type of blue edging on indigo. It fights the first light with a speckle of stars and a bruising horizon. That, too, feels like he feels. An uphill battle. A losing climb. The sun will rise.
But not yet. The Solterran sea brings with it a cool gust of coastal wind. He might relish it, but the scent of brine and fish will forever remind him of the unpleasantries of the world he left. They remain, however, a vivid and pungent reminder of—well, of the life he is here to finish.
Vercingtorix, as he walks, picks up small stones and seashells Rather than collect them, or even cast them into the sea, he systematically crushes what he can in his telekinesis. Otherwise, he tosses it end-over-end into the ocean. His mother had worn seashells around her neck, he remembers, like a talisman. She said it would ward off evil spirits and create fertility. Torix supposes some of it might have worked, and some didn’t. He was her only son and, besides himself, she had three daughters.
Sisters. He should think of them as sisters. He doesn’t.
Everything in his household had always been a competition. Last he had heard, they had married his classmates. The sons of other esteemed generals and commanders.
But to them, he is dead, and he knows it.
Torix pauses at last. He is looking out to the sea; it is tumultuous as always. What he is looking for he doesn’t find, and so he turns away.
He is startled to see the stallion standing there, vibrant and red, like the way the bruised sun has turned the horizon to a cut throat slaughter.
“Can I invite you to a romantic walk on the beach, then?” The tone Torix utilises is deprecating; nearly an insult, but not quite. Almost a joke, but more crudely presented. He does not like being surprised.
