well any man with a microphone
can tell you what he loves the most
can tell you what he loves the most
It’s been a long time since August has walked the hallways of Denocte’s castle. When he was a boy and his mother worked here as a lady’s maid, he and his father had come once in a while to greet her, and she had shown him where she worked and introduced him to all the cooks and butlers and background folk who made such a place run smoothly. It had seemed impossibly grand to him, then. Now it just seems impossible.
Around every corner some still-boyish part of him hopes for a glimpse of his mother, or to hear her laughter echoing down some narrow side-hall. He hasn’t been back to this part of the city since she was killed; it worries him, the way those old thoughts and sorrows seep up like brackish water from a well he’d thought long since dry.
But then he begins to notice how much has changed. Isra the unicorn, Isra the storyteller-queen, has been remaking the castle the way she’s begun to remake the court itself (or to try; he knows how stubborn Denocte can be). Gemstones glisten from where they’re embedded in pillars that were once only stone. Plants bloom impossibly along railings and even the floors seem to shimmer. August imagines her walking here, changing what she touches, as her dragon makes lazy spirals far overhead.
He doesn’t know where the queen is today. Perhaps still on the island, looking for relics in the humid jungle. With the exception of a passing guard or servant the golden stallion is more or less alone - so he is all the more intrigued to step into the great hall (like the belly of a whale, he thinks) and find a stranger there.
At once he knows he’s never seen her before; she is striking, as impossible-looking as the castle they stand in, a myriad of patterns leeched of color. For a moment he pauses down the hall, passing his assessing gaze over her, and then he steps forward with an easy-going kind of smile, the echo of his steps announcing him well before he arrives at her side. As he dips his muzzle in greeting, he notes the sharp point of teeth against her dark lips, and the winding of what appears to be barbed wire around her long neck.
Interesting.
“Fascinating, isn’t it?” he says, but his silver eyes with their long lashes are not on the architecture. “And to think it’s been here for over a hundred years.”
@Camillia
