FIRE-LIT, HALF SILHOUETTE AND HALF MYTH, THE WOLF CIRCLES MY PAST, TREADING THE LEAVES INTO A BED TILL HE SLEEPS, BLACK SNOUT ON EXTENDED PAWS. BLACK SNOUT ON SULPHUR BODY, HE NUDGED HIS WAY INTO MY CONSCIOUSNESS. THERE IS NOTHING THAT WON'T BE LIT UP IN THE DARK TORCH OF HIS EYES.
Is it heavy, the crown?
Yes, yes, yes—
Orestes turns to face her.
She is there, dark and feral against the brilliance of the snow. Like a reckoning. The silence might remain aside from that malignant voice, but he is in no hurry to reply. An ear swivels to listen to the distant passage of those brilliant elk, the crunch of their hooves through the snow and underbrush, the musical cry of the brook.
Orestes says, “Yes.”
But duty should not be light.
Duty should not be a feather.
No; it will always be iron, or
gold, dense about the neck,
or the weight of the sea
when someone is sinking.
Orestes does not know her name, but he knows of her. The viper. A remnant of Zolin’s reign; a remnant of Solterra’s violent, turbulent past. Orestes does not doubt that out of all the Solterrans, they have the most in common.
We have survived genocide.
But he knows even more intrinsically that she must resent him, another monarch, another sovereign capable of atrocity. “Why did you not claim it?” Perhaps he feels resentment, too, although he cannot say why. Perhaps it is because she is at once a creature like him; and utterly foreign.
Orestes thinks in that moment his heart is cold enough to become a leviathan; a creature of the deep, the dark, of a world he’s forgetting. He almost remembers what it felt like to become a beast; a serpent; a monstrosity. Perhaps it is because he feels so far from the sun in that moment, but the golden glow of his tattoos bleeds from his skin like the light of a dying star. They become cool, silver, metallic.
In that moment, he realises why she unsettles him. In her eyes, he sees the expression of his own people; in her eyes, he can remember every failure he has ever made.
"THE WOLVES HAVE
BEEN SLAUGHTERED
NOW, A HEDGE OF
SMOKING GUN BARRELS
RINGS MY DAUGHTERS
DREAMS"
BEEN SLAUGHTERED
NOW, A HEDGE OF
SMOKING GUN BARRELS
RINGS MY DAUGHTERS
DREAMS"
