There were none then who could destroy either your head or your lyre,
Even as those furious ones raved and tore;
And all the sharp stones which they threw at your heart
Turned to softness upon your breast and, behold, were blessed with Hearing.
Vercingtorix is here because Adonai asked him to be. And so he haunts the city of a man he once killed, marvelling at the intricacies his own decisions wrought—
He is here, in Solterra, with the desert in his lungs because he chased after the rumour of the condemned surviving, and others shores to conquor—
No, he hears Damascus’s voice intercedes.
You are here because when you condemned them, you condemned yourself.
Of course the dragon would remind Vercingtorix of the actualities of his fantasies; of course he would destroy the nuance.
Do I need to remind you
the serpentine voice hisses in his own mind, that when you Bound Orestes’s Soul, you shattered your own?
He can see Damascus’s opal eyes in his mind.
Do I need to remind you, that I am a piece of that broken soul given voice, and body, and fury?
Leave, leave, leave.
But broken things—
they come back to what broke them. And so even as Vercingtorix drifts through the party—even as he admires Adonai through the garden foliage, or the marble statues—he feels the oppressive weight of his bonded, reminding him—
Vercingtorix is here because he broke something irrevocably and, in doing so, that thing owns him. His mouth is dry. The music is too loud—too abrasive. Do they not know, there is no music where he from?
Only the sea, shushing into the night and the day and every time in-between, into every hour and every minute.
It would be more bearable if he were speaking with Adonai now, he thinks.
It would be more bearable if he did not stand there with the motion of the party a blur around him.
Vercingtorix drifts toward the musician with something like disdain in his heart. His own lack of belonging splinters him—everything is foreign, everything is strange, and the idea of a celebration in and of itself…
Well, he had only tasted celebrations after a severe victory. And this was not that.
He might not have seen her as she laid against the marble if it were not for the fact her appearance evoked a certain, instinctual reaction. How she lay, the stillness of her body—all of it reminded him of a corpse. Vercingtorix glanced at her a second time.
The broken, Damascus hisses.
Find the broken. Vercingtorix hesitates—and then he begins to walk toward her. But when he stands beside her, and besides the musician, he has nothing to say except,
“What does it sound like, to you?”
Oh you lost god! You unending trail!
Only because hatred at last tore asunder and dispersed you
Are we now the hearers and a mouth to Nature.
ooc: I wanted this to be Aeneas but he isn't made yet I'm sorry
