[P] we always walked a very thin line.

[Adonai]

i am poppies in the field / red and cold / i am sleeping alone / and / i am light / i am light

I

have snatched my brother away from the vestiges of a troublesome sleep.

When Pilate jerks awake, his face an ashen gleam besides mine, his shock is reflected in my own—my wings snap out as I ease a stride backwards, my pulse a steady hum in my throat. A tube of ink-spotted parchment is knocked in the process from his desk to the floor, rolling to a stop at my hooves. Of the two of us, I have always been the quicker to startle—is it strange, that Pilate is the steadier one? Mine has always been feigned.

For a moment there is no sound but Pilate’s soft breathless pants as he gathers himself up again, spider-webbing cracks melting back into jadeite scales. I make no move towards the disturbed parchment because a servant has already swept in and retrieved it, small as a sparrow, her eyes flashing demurely to mine before she places the sheet on a pile of unopened letters and melts back into the tapestry of the room. The edge of the parchment flutters in the wind blowing in from a window. I make out the first word printed in a slanting hand before looking away, unnerved by the intimacy of reading.

This disturbance, utterly unremarkable, is over in less than a second. Yet the damage has already been done: my eye is pulled from the parchment to the desk to the room: a controlled, manic display of all that is Pilate and holy. I have not stepped inside it since the night of our father’s funeral and my ensuing morning ceremony, my title of ‘First Prince’ swept aside for the more eponymous ‘Head of Ieshan.’ 

To look upon my brother’s room now is to look upon a relic I’d thought sunk to the bottom of the sea.

There is another of his sleek white robes slung over the back of a chair; a saucer of cold tea besides a cameo of our mother on the mantle; books bound in vellum or leather, because he has always been fonder of them than I, scattered on every dusted surface like a cat that has grown bored of its toys. The familiarity of the scene twitches my brow into a ghost of annoyance before I catch myself, flush the words from my mouth (“Untidy as ever, Pilate.”), and shudder back into the present.

I am a statue on a plinth when I tell him that he is the first. The words leave my mouth in a tangle of sounds and the music of unbelieving laughter. Even after everything, the brother who has ruined me is the first, the only. What does that say about me? That I have lost everyone else? That I never had anyone else to begin with?

“I had no doubts,” he says back, his eyes steady in mine. I swallow and turn towards the open window, where the moon hangs thin and sallow; my smile darkens. “I have always admired you. Do you know that? And Solis cannot possibly be any harder than me to impress.”

“I know, Pilate,” I murmur. The elixir is a drug in my veins; it basks the world in the rosy unreality of dream-fugue, and all hurts—past, present, future—gain a diaphanous air of absurdity. “You have always overestimated me.” And then I laugh, because everything is absurd. What he has done to me; what I swore to myself I’d do back. And at the heart of everything, like a jewel in the palm of a hand: our mother, for making us this way. 

My face is bleached bone-white by weak, sallow moonlight. “Were it not for the God’s intervention, you would’ve gotten what you wanted soon enough.” I lean further out the window, until one push is all I need to fall. I turn to him, my eyes near-silver in the light, my spine pressed into the ledge. 

My wing stretches towards him, until it comes to a rest at his cheek. “I was ready to grant you your victory.”

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