[P] it was a pure creature [party]

[Adonai]

A D O N A I

T

he weight of the lyre at my shoulders stills me as I am assaulted by the smell of rich leather, new steel, arena sand. I suck in a breath and it rattles. My guest is somewhere behind me and I am at once eager to see his expression and terrified to let him see mine.

I am attempting to sell him a lie. I am attempting to show him that before I was this dying husk of a prince, I had shot an arrow into the eye of a teryr. I had beaten Miriam into the sand during a match, and heard the bone of her shoulder crack beneath my blade. I had warred against my brother. I had not shied away from violence, but embraced it; I disliked it out of principle but that did not mean I was incapable of it, did not mean that I was weak.

Such is the arrogance of one who has never seen real battle. Such is the foolishness of one who has never seen any death in action except for his own.

I am sure, Torix had said to me back in the hall, it is all to my liking. I had smiled; alcohol had kept it from becoming a beam. Even mention of Pilate had not truly dimmed my mood, once I had gotten over the initial distaste, because Pilate's lauded beauty hadn't captured Vercingtorix's appreciation as I'd feared, and—even if it was a lie—his shoulder had pressed warm and sure against mine in the narrow walkway taking us down to the armoury. 

I cannot ask anything more of him.

And yet. When his silence lasts for a breath too long in the face of swords and axes and maces, objects I'd thought would endear him to me, objects critical to this lie I am trying to sell him—dread begins to drag talons down my chest. I have made a mistake. Somehow, I have offended him.

“Adonai." I barely recognise my name spoken from his lips. Stiffly I pivot towards him, my stance near militant. He has eased the door shut behind him and I cannot decipher the softness holding together his words. “Will you play for me?"

I am so taken aback by this that my eyes widen in the way they did before I had entombed myself in a skin of marble. In a way, it had been my first death.

“The lyre?" My voice wavers between uncertainty and astonishment. I have not played for an audience since boyhood; I would never think he was of the type to enjoy such frivolities. Yet before I truly know what I am doing, I nod, and the lyre has been eased off from its the strap around my shoulder and held gently, like a child, against my chest. My cape is discarded in this struggle, and splays over the seat of a lone stool. 

I glance towards him, mystified, before easing myself down to the scarred wooden floor. As I do, I struggle to fill up the silence; his request has sprung out from the underbrush and caught me unawares. And when I am unaware—I am sickeningly prone to meekness. “You didn't—strike me as the type, really," I say, lightly.

I bite my tongue to avoid picking at the strings as I wait for him to settle besides me.

I hum out the first notes of a song, and when I have my melody, I play.

Adonai's song
When I was young, I was never seen without a gold-tipped lyre strapped like a quiver around my shoulders. I would strum it as I went to and from lessons, accompanied always by its sweet melody and smooth wood grain, testing out chords and keys I would arrange into songs inked between sheets of stained parchment.

If there was no lyre at my side, I was not Adonai. I was not the prince of soft smiles and softer dissents. To me, it was as much of a companion as a hound is to other boys, and a lyre is far less troublesome than a hound to keep. That, I suspect, was the sole reason why I had been allowed to nurse this habit late into adolescence. My tutors were rarely sentimental and hardly inclined to allow boys to grow into soft-spined cowards. Their reputations were staked on me. 

I was allowed my lyre because if they did not allow me something, they feared that I would break before I was ever close to grown.

I finish one song and bleed its ending chords into the opening of another. I am not sure how long I play before I say, my voice breaking roughly through a melancholic refrain, “It seems like—you know many things about me, while I know near nothing of you.” Is it nostalgia or is it drink or is it him—Vercingtorix with the eyes of the sea—that has caused this thundering ache in my chest?

I know nothing about him. I know enough to know that I want to know everything about him. This is torment. This is exhilarating. A curl of my hair has fallen into my eyes and I push it away; I wish to see all of him. Under the light of a single torch, his skin gleams like the steel of a blade. I do not notice how I, myself, have begun to glow a faint, undulating aurum. 

There is only my song and Vercingtorix, Vercingtorix.

Before me his scars are gulleys, marks of old violence, and I wish to know the cause of every one so that I may play his words over and over and over in my head when he is gone. I forget that I am sick. I forget that I am dying. I lean towards him, my eyes shadowed, the strings of my lyre trembling in sorrow, until I see myself reflected in the pools of his gaze and recoil, as if burned.

I am sick. I am dying. And I have never wished to mourn for myself until I have discovered that I am broken.

When I speak again, it is a thin, thin chord. “Was I wrong, to bring you here?” My lyre sinks down to the floor. 

My wing reaches for the scar slashing through his sea-green eye.




I'm forever chasing after time
But everybody dies, dies
If I could buy forever at a price
I would buy it twice, twice

But if the earth ends in fire
And the seas are frozen in time
There'll be just one survivor
The memory that I was yours

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@Vercingtorix