[P] i wish i found some chords in an order that is new

[Adonai]

It'd be to my brother, 'cause we have the same nose / same clothes homegrown a stone's throw from a creek we used to roam

❦

I

n the hours just before dawn, the world shudders to a halt as it is polished anew. The flowers receive fresh coats of paint; the leaves, a daub of wax and ochre. Songbirds sprout new tail feathers, soft and drooping, and twig-legged deer powder the white back into their tails.

Every morning I am up before the dawn, and I have yet to see these small miracles. 

The house is so quiet and still that as I feel my way unsteadily over the raised stone path leading out to the gardens I grow more and more uncertain if I am dreaming or awake. I have not slept—it never seems like I do—and when a day is unending it begins to grow dreamlike appendages by the hour. I have not taken a lantern, and the darkness looms so thickly over me I feel it slipping down my throat like wisps of black wool.

Eventually I find the garden path, and by then I am no longer the only one awake. Blue dawn stretches endless beyond me, the sun a red disc on the horizon; the dark heads of gardeners rise out of the flowerbeds like waking nymphs. Their dreary eyes see me only when I am almost upon them, and they startle into low, hasty bows.

I drift aimlessly this way—gardener’s bows rippling before me like a wave, like I am some sort of god they must appease, or a wandering spirit they must acknowledge—past dewy gardens and hidden greenhouses, palm trees heavy with fruit, lindens drooping with unnatural bloom. I wear nothing but my own skin and it punishes me by contracting my muscles in tiny, violent spasms whenever a breeze so much as whispers my way. 

A bee drones sleepily by my ear and I watch as it hovers over a rosebud, pollen sacks heavy and fragrant. I envy its freedom, its movement, even it's looming death. It is so vibrantly alive I feel less than a corpse besides it.

My lyre is strapped to my back, and as I walk I pluck out odd notes, testing their resonance and harmony.

Our grounds are labyrinthine and prone to trickery. Before, I had known them better than anyone, as Mernatius had lived at the end and I at the beginning. But the red-brick cottage stands empty, shuttered windows like staring eyes, and my own memory is riddled with holes. I can recall specific things at odd hours or nothing at all. By the time the sleek white domes of the house rise like spires above me, it is noon. The hours have passed like seconds. 

I have not eaten since yesterday afternoon, and as I creep sluggishly over the flagstones my hunger makes itself known first with a dull ache, and then—when that is not enough—barrels like a bull into my stomach. I keel over at the foot of a marble lion, gasping.

“Prince Adonai!” Vaguely I hear the sloshing of water as a gardener sets down his bucket and rushes towards me. I silence him with a desperate shake of my head, my heart lurching and butterfly quick. The act is pitiful but I lack the time to care. Somehow I stop him from running to fetch the doctors; he returns instead with a plate of grapes and I eat them greedily, handfuls at a time, like a child. He nods knowingly at my watchful silence when he takes back the plate, piled with bare stems like bramble. He will tell none of what he has witnessed.

Yet before the gardener, who is little more than a boy, turns to leave (and then I see it: the mouth twisted down in pity—and anger slices white-hot through the pain: you dare to pity me, a prince?) he says: “Are you expecting a visitor, Prince Adonai? Someone waits at the gates.”

I am not. But I know that recently, Pilate has. It is only noon. My brother is still in his room, busy with business that should have been mine, and my sisters have gone out for a picnic, or a hunt, or whatever they do now for leisure. I am the only one here.

Suddenly the thought of taking something from Pilate—the thought of that power—thrills me to my bones. A lover or a friend with a pretty face—does it matter? The only thing that matters is that he is Pilate's, and I savor the revelation like a starving man.

Recovery in the face of such an opportunity is appallingly easy. I thank the boy and when he is gone, turn down the path that leads through a thatch of olive trees, fruitless yet full-leaved, planted there for the sole purpose of obscuring the blemish on our marble splendor: the looming, ironclad gates. 

I am not at all surprised when I find a figure of purest black, thin-limbed and sleek-winged, pacing a groove into the ground worn smooth by centuries of Ieshan heirs and servants. My steps hardly falter as I navigate carefully down the earth-cut stairs that end in wrought-iron bars, my eyes a frosty, forget-me-not-blue. 

The air around Pilate's dark visitor is faintly electrified. I lift my brows when I realize I am not imagining it. It is oddly reassuring: my dreams cannot conjure such strange details. His eyes are a stormier version of mine, more gray than blue, edged with steel. I peer into them, unblinking, unflinching, and slowly—but then quicker and quicker—my mind shuffles into an echo of my old self. I do not smile, but I have never needed to.

The guard, sweat dripping in lines down his chest, stares at me, perplexed at my presence, and I ignore him. The sun beats hot and drumbeat-thick at my back. My lyre casts a halo of light at my hooves as I think over what I will say; I know I have been silent for a beat too long but as the First Prince I was accustomed to keeping others waiting, and as the Second I am entitled to more. Even Pilate humors me. What can anyone say to me now?

Finally, I settle for an innocuous lie. 

“If you are looking for my brother,” I say, quiet and so serious it can only be made in jest, “then I will save you the trouble. He is not here.

@Andras