« don't die so far from the sea »
The gossip of the street follows him into the desert.
Foreigner,
unknown,
ignorant.
He does not know
No. He does not know
what they have suffered.
He has never met the tyranny of Raum, nor a teryr in the desert
screaming bloodlust at the sky. He does not know what it feels like to wear a silver collar, or a gold one. He never knew the boy-king or had someone hurt by him. He does not know what it feels like to be a slave.
But he does know what it is like to wear a brand.
The canyon’s walls loom up before him and he enters, smooth and quiet and naturally. For one who was not born in the desert, it becomes him, and there is a severity within the sandstone that is familiar. I have been to the bottom of the sea, he thinks, reaching with his mind to grasp at fistfuls of sand and rock. And it is not so different.
Somewhere in these canyons, he thinks, is where Ra and Tut took him to pray. It is where Solis may have given him his magic, when his heart still belonged to the sea and the black cliffs of a distant land. Now the sun beats upon him and he feels as though he is forged into something different, and those memories are far—but never quite far enough.
He doesn’t know what we’ve been through, he has heard them say.
Orestes closes his eyes, lifts his face toward the light.
No. He does not.
But he does know what it is like to be born to be the last. The Keeper. Their Souls weigh heavy on him, today, when he thinks of where he has come from. The wise-man at his birth said, this one, this one is a Prince.
Orestes remembers the way they looked at him, still, with such pristine clarity. Their faces are paintings in his mind, the emotion etched eternally. Hope. The hope radiated out of them like light. They believed he could save them. But he had known, he had always known, they were already gone. There remain too many dark places in his memory where there should be Souls that he bore to death; but there were too many to bear to death, too many to put to sleep in the sea. Too few were reborn. And there was always the killing. The nets and the gold dust and the iron. He had always known and still, somewhere across the sea, rests the last of them in chains and binds.
No, Orestes has never been a slave.
He did not know Raum.
But tyranny comes in many shapes and sometimes
he remembers how the ocean can taste not just of salt, but blood
Enough, he tells himself. He opens his eyes and steps forward. The canyon opens up like a chasm and he thinks, I will understand. The physicality of it is easily translatable, is learnable. Orestes knows his nature; knows he is a survivalist, and he will learn every inch of his territory as though he were born to it. The only way to do that is step by step, day by day, until the sun burns the sea from him and he learns again how to lose what he loves. He weaves through the canyon and wonders what it would be like for it to flood; he thinks of storms and sand and drowning.
But there are no clouds in the sky, only the sun, and the heat of the day has yet to penetrate the early morning. There is a lingering chill that holds to the shadowed earth from the night, and about him life arises in places unexpected and unknown. A roadrunner sprints in front of him, raising a thin line of dust, and somewhere else a snake rattles against rocks. Overhead a vulture flies high above, a solitary silhouette. Orestes strolls quietly, the muscle moving beneath his tight skin, and he wonders what it would be like to transform into such creatures. His mind cannot comprehend it, and so he does not try. He simply admires their beauty for a moment, and continues on.
WE ARE AFRAID
@Thana / speaks / notes: text text
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