Vercingtorix
—
W
hen he closes his eyes, it almost feels like home.The sea wafts colder air against his face; the quiet dark seems in and of itself a kind of baptism, a kind of gentle drowning. Vercingtorix keeps his eyes closed against the brisk wind; it knots tangles in his mane and whips the fine hairs against the soft skin of his cheeks and eyelids. It nearly smells the same so far from the cities; the cold sea, with a humidity that stabs the nostrils, the season bringing with it frigid water and something almost akin to dormancy.
When he closes his eyes, he can pretend—for a transient moment—he is not so far from everything he has ever known. He can pretend it is the same ocean, with the same primordial magic (less like a magic and more like a whisper of what should be, what could be).
Vercingtorix opens his eyes.
The sand and sea-stones are not black, as in Oresziah. Beneath the night sky, they seem dull grey underfoot. He is a step away from the frigid surf as it licks up the shoreline; each push and pull of the sea draws it closer and every now and then the waves nearly touch his hooves. But it doesn’t, as if it knows—as if it knows he hates it.
“Some say that to move past pain, you must wallow first in suffering.”
Damascus emerges from the forest behind him, where the sand hems out into long grasses and then, eventually, soil and trees. The dragon parts them with a nearly quiet shiver of branches and leaves; there is a cracking, and Damascus steps from the foliage into the sand.
Vercingtorix recognises the note of sarcasm—barbed, bitter—in Damascus’s voice.
There is, too, a bit of blame.
The golden stallion turns from the sea. The dragon follows him along the edge of trees, using their darkness as a kind of camouflage. The aimlessness of his own direction unnerves Vercingtorix. In his entire life, he has never been aimless—he has never returned again and again to the sea, as if, as if—
it has an answer—
what kind of answer?—
Down the shoreline, he spots a silhouette. There is a moment when Vercingtorix and the dragon both pause—a moment when solitude seems favourable to any kind of interaction. But there is—there is an echoing nothingness inside, a desultory lack of direction.
“Well?” Damascus asks.
When he asks, it sounds like hunger given voice.
When he asks, it sounds like the echo into the abyss.
Vercingtorix does not answer—he only begins to walk toward the silhouette, pretending it is not the same aimless feeling that compelled him to stare out at the sea.
Time always seems to pass differently walking down a lone stretch of beach.
Perhaps it's the lull of the waves, hypnotic.
Perhaps its the strange middle-distance that erects itself on the horizon, as if—as if it does not end, not truly.
Either way, it feels like a lifetime until they are close enough to recognise the mare. And by then, it is too late to leave.
She is standing ankle-deep in the water. Vercingtorix recognises the despondent. Perhaps it is the ex-captain in him, the leader.
He stops a little ways off, close enough to speak but not close enough to threaten. He simply appraises her for a moment; the bitterness of their last conversation lays thick on his tongue.
Damascus, sensing the atmosphere, settles onto the still-warm sand besides Vercingtorix. He rests his head on his forelegs in a gesture nearly doglike, nearly unassuming.
In another life, he would have been standing there preparing for war.
In this one, he only says: “And what brings you here, besides the sea’s siren song?” It is a mock imitation of their first meeting. He adds, with careful contemplation: “Elena.”
How woeful, strange, are the alleys of the City of Pain,
where in the false silence created from too much noise,
a thing cast out from the mold of emptiness
swaggers that gilded hubbub, the bursting memorial.
