rise like lions after slumber / in unvanquishable number / shake your chains to earth like dew / which in sleep had fallen on you
F
rom her tower, the harbors of Solterra looked like a row of craggy teeth; all crumbling sandstone monoliths sunk to their knees in sand, and rickety piers pressed end to end like matchsticks. Ships trundled wearily into port only to shoot off again like pond skaters when their loads were hauled off in color-coded caravans, red-roofed for the markets and gold-roofed for the castle.
Now and again a sapphire-roof, bound for maison de Hajakha.
Up close, the harbors looked less like teeth and more like a circus that had lost its tents. Everyone was a performer: from the gap-toothed merchants hawking tiny glass baubles at head-swooning prices, to the sweating apprentices running from caravan to caravan like headless chickens, to the sailors piling off the ships bow-legged, rowdy, waving jugs of rum like batons.
Even Scarab-raised Aghavni felt, for a wide-eyed moment, desperately overwhelmed. And a moment was all it took.
"Miss," came a drawling male voice by her ear. She stiffened; she hadn't heard him approach. "You dropped your pin."
Aghavni knew, for a fact, that she hadn't worn any sort of adornment—not even her scarf—when she'd left that morning for the harbors. A noble's whelp she couldn't deny being, but she'd practically grown up in the Denoctian underbelly. She knew better than to parade through foreign streets unaccompanied, draped in finery like a little lost princess.
She knew how that story ended.
"Did I?" Slowly, Aghavni spun around and blinked up into a pair of slanted amber eyes, lined in thick kohl. He was older than her but not by much; around August's age, she guessed, or perhaps a bit older. Discreetly, she looked him over and tried to calm the thump thump thump of her heart.
A gold ring gleamed in the boy's left ear, and a saber hung sheathed at his hip. It was a fine saber—much too fine to match the threadbare cloak slung lazily over his shoulders, or the hungry, satisfied way he watched her. Her telekinesis tightened around the smooth wooden guard of her fan, its black ribbons tied into her mane.
"You should be careful, miss," said the boy, as he held out a golden sun brooch studded with sapphires. It gleamed like a snowflake under the midwinter sun. Her stomach sank. What he held out to her, was a brooch bearing the crest of Hajakha. "You stick out like a sore thumb in these parts. Not everyday one as pretty as you wanders out to the harbors."
She knew what word he had neglected to say. Saw it reflected in the curve of his smile: alone.
—wanders out alone to the harbors.
"I thank you for the concern," she replied with a tight smile. "But I'm afraid that pin was dropped by another. I don't own anything like it. Good day—" She ducked her head and made to brush past him. During the rebellions of Zolin's time, the Hajakhan vaults had been plundered when the mansion had been stormed by rebels. Her father had taken pains to secure most of what they'd lost over the years, but it wasn't surprising that there remained a few Hajakhan treasures still in circulation. Like the sapphire-studded sun brooch.
The boy knew exactly who she was when he'd held it out to her. Aghavni's steps quickened. Loathe as she was to show apprehension, she began to angle towards a bobbing dock a small ship had just pulled into, disgorging sailors like flopping fish.
"Leaving so soon, Princess?"
A threadbare cloak snapped out and pressed against her chest, digging its corners into her long mane. Aghavni tossed her neck savagely and tried to shake it off, but the cloak—wound into the shape of a scarf—restrained her with crushing strength. The boy sidled languidly up to her, and pressed his mouth to her pinned ear. His fiery coat and flashing golden eyes reminded Aghavni of a tiger. "Have your kind not learned anything? Your father hid you away for all those years," he crooned. "But he is not here now. No one is."
A sharp crack—wooden ribs blossoming into metal. Aghavni pressed the blade of her innocuous, silk-skinned fan to the soft underside of the boy's throat. "Get off," she whispered, just as crooning.
Though there is nobody else in cramped room, the stallion behind the desk doesn’t bat an eye, or look up from whatever he’s writing with a feather quill that August finds aggravatingly grandiose. Sunlight slants like bars between them, dancing with dust motes; he is eager for outside air, eager for solid ground beneath his feet, eager to have his saber back at his side and the H.M. Buttercup well behind him.
All that keeps him from it is bosun currently ignoring him. August thinks that he’d very much like to meet him some evening in a dark alleyway of Denocte. Or even a brightly lit one.
“Sir, my sword. I assure you, as soon as I have it you and I will be rid of one another forever.” His voice is schooled into careful neutrality, though he can feel the bees’-buzz of anger beginning.
At last the bay looked up, the grays scattered in his muzzle glinting in the light, his green eyes narrowed. “Sailor,” he said, and managed to make both syllables drip with disdain. “Although,” he said, turning to the row of bins behind him, “I suppose once I give you these you’re not even that, are you?” There was something triumphant in the crook of his smile when he straightened again, but August’s eyes fell to the sword he’d set on the desk.
He wants to say something scathing, something Minya or Manon would be proud of, but all he does is press his lips into a thin smile, take his father’s saber, and go.
Because no matter what he might have said, Hector the bosun is right. As soon as he steps onto the Solterran dock, August is nobody.
At least he is a nobody back on solid ground. For a moment the palomino only stands in the winter sunlight, watching the world cycle onward around him. So many voices, so many horses, so much activity - after weeks at sea, it’s almost overwhelming. And it’s not even home.
Maybe he should have waited until the ship returned to Denocte in another week. But August couldn’t bear the thought of another day on board - and he had to talk to Aghavni. Even if he hadn’t brought her a necklace with pearls he size of eggs. Even if she hadn’t told him anything of her plans before running off to Solterra over a month ago.
(Of course that had always been the plan for the princess. He’d known it from the day he’d met her. But to play diplomat to a foreign-born stranger and not even ask him to join her-)
Anyway. His conversation with Senna just after, his decision to try his luck as a sailor - she must know the timing wasn’t a coincidence. But she’d made it clear enough that she didn’t require his protection anymore. She hadn’t for a long time. And it wasn’t her fault that it left him…adrift, one could say.
The palomino sighs and lifts his gaze until he marks the palace, its domes and towers rising high and bright over the rest of the city. When he readjusts his saber in its sheath at its side, it feels only a little like a mockery of all the adventures he’d imagined before setting off. Then August begins the long walk to find his princess.
Only it turns out to not be such a long walk after all.
At first his eyes slip past what looks only like a young couple, tucked in a close embrace - a common enough sight at the docks, which saw their share of lengthy goodbyes. But no number of months at sea could erase the pattern of Aghavni’s markings from his mind, and at once his attention whips back, his heartbeat quickening, his silver eyes narrowed. It is not a mistake, not a figment of his troubled mind, but truly her, and -
It is possible that he is a lover of hers, the chestnut stallion with his mouth so close to her ear and his sword within easy reach at his side, and possible that they are only having a quarrel. But August notes the set of her ears and lines of her body, the way the wound cloak presses tightly enough to dimple the skin of her neck, how they stand in shadow, half-hidden from passersby. Already he’s setting course for them with the intensity of a fired arrow, and for the first time in months he’s certain of something - that if this bastard isn’t gone in the next ten seconds, he won’t be going anywhere ever again.
“Aghavni,” he calls out as he closes the space between them, drawing their eyes and others. “What a surprise! You didn’t have to come all the way down here to meet me. And who’s your friend?” His voice is casual, warm as liquid gold, but by now he’s near enough for them both to see the fury in his eyes, though his gaze is only for the other boy. It promises leave now or die. And he doesn’t need to draw the saber at his side for the message to resonate (and certainly the pressure of the blade against the stallion’s throat doesn’t hurt, though August has yet to make this detail out).
Outnumbered, threatened, under the growing scrutiny of the crowd, the chestnut flees. August wants to pursue, but settles for memorizing every detail he can before the boy disappears around a corner. When he turns back to Aghavni, his heartbeat is still elevated, and the roil of emotions - fear, anger, surprise, confusion - are still flooding his system like spilled mead.
Before he speaks he breathes; in and out, in and out, seeing red and tasting salt and spice and faded winter sunlight. Then he looks at her and says, “I’ll assume, had I not intervened, you were moments away from gutting him like a fish.” He does not add the way I taught you, but it is there in his expression anyway, just this side of accusatory.
It is not the reunion he'd been imagining.
But it's not much worse.
August - -
there's a lover in the story but the story's still the same
rise like lions after slumber / in unvanquishable number / shake your chains to earth like dew / which in sleep had fallen on you
A
ghavni.
At first she thinks: how dare he. How dare August just appear like that, like Solis' Deliverance, golden as all Midas, pretty as a well-spun lie. She had not summoned him. There had been no lamp, no genie, no magical excuse—no reason for him to be there.
And then she thinks: the bastard!—because, like a doll, she has been slammed back against a wall and hears more than feels something break. Her ribs, she thinks, with a twist of horror. Or the traitorous little organ beating beneath.
But it is neither. A glass bauble of a galleon, complete with six sails and a figurehead, lies smashed to smithereens beneath her hoof. It would almost be funny, if it were that type of situation. One that could be funny.
"Who is that?" hisses the boy, the bastard, jerking his head away to snarl—and that is his second mistake. With a snap of the neck, a flash of the teeth, Aghavni dismisses August as a figment of her desperate imagination (like a marquess dismisses a diagnosis of hysteria, as one does) and slices her fan upwards into a pulsing throat. He howls, though he shouldn't have.
It was nothing more than a nick. She was being gentle. (His first mistake: humiliating her by choosing a tattered cloak as an assassination weapon.)
"You're here for me, don't forget," she chokes out. Warm blood rains down in a gorey baptism, spattering her face in a red constellation; the boy retaliates by twisting the cloak constricting her neck so tight she sees stars. White ones, bright as diamonds. The saber on his back begins to stir, a snake shedding its skin, grating against its rusty scabbard. "I've played with you too long. Time to sleep, princess."
It is not supposed to be like this. Black edges Aghavni's vision. She gasps for the breath that does not come. In her head, a younger her screams: this is not how the story goes!
And that isn't how the story goes—because when Aghavni unscrews her eyes, lash pulling away from lash, she finds herself staring dazedly not at molten gold but silver. Cold silver, like the moon, like—
"August." She starts at his presence, stumbling in the sand, and forgets to be mortified by it. This close, he smells like salt and musty cabinets and the sun. She has never smelled like that, the sun, however sun-born (and sun-marked) she is. I’ll assume, had I not intervened, you were moments away from gutting him like a fish. Though his tone is buttery-light, she hears what he doesn't say. Picks away the accusation clinging to his tongue with a chisel, because she knows him too well not to do it, and perhaps that is the problem.
Perhaps that has always been the problem.
She inhales shakily and wipes blood from her mouth. "He underestimated me," she says slowly; half of her still believes the August standing in front of her, shadow blotting out the winter sun, is but a ghost conjured by fear and—her tongue knots in her mouth—a banished specter of longing.
And that is all it takes for her to remember how to be angry. Malice straightens her bruised spine and darkens her fluttering eyes. With one short stride she closes the distance between them, rests the tip of her fan (still bloody, like the rest of her) on the curve of his cheek. This close, it is easy to make out the tiny flecks of gold swimming in silver irises.
This close, it is easy to become an amnesiac. "So this is really you," she says ruefully, "or I died and entered some demented sort of afterlife."
(This close—is dangerous. And she has always realized danger too late.)
@August //
is it true that a reunion between Scarab kids requires a healthy anointing of blood (?)
Normally when Aghavni looked at him, he found himself caught for a moment by her eyes. Never more than half a heartbeat, but no matter the years they’d spent together it’s like even his memory can’t believe their color, their intensity.
But this time he doesn’t notice them at all.
When she looks up, August only sees what he had failed to before - the blood streaking her face and throat, not like warpaint but like the aftermath of violence, too random to be art. For a moment he is transported, back to the first time he saw Solterra, through flaking iron bars that he’d pressed his cheek against when the caravan jolted to a stop and the first cries began. And two days before that (always this moment) when he’d watched a soldier slit his mother’s throat. That same vital red, the same beats of swelling, drowning panic - how had he missed seeing the knife? - and he isn’t thinking at all, his thoughts are birds scattering at a gunshot, except for I’ve failed, I’ve lost her.
It’s only when she says his name that he realizes the blood isn’t hers. He is there when she stumbles, dropping his shoulder to support her own, and the warm press of her skin against his is the first touch he’s felt in months. It is enough to more firmly ground him; as soon as she’s steady one of them steps away, and from this distance he assesses her for wounds. August can only stare as her mouth leaves a bright smear of red across her shoulder. He feels a little like staggering, himself; he half wonders if he might jolt awake still at sea.
But like her eyes, the real Aghavni has always been too striking, too alive, to ever be confused with the imitation of memory.
He underestimated me. So it seemed, and thank all the gods for it. He wants to take back his statement, and his tone; he wants to kiss her forehead, her neck where the scarf had pressed, her fluttering pulse. He lets none of these things show. Neither does he know whether it’s relief that’s prompted them, or homesickness, or - something else. “Good,” he says, “I hope the bastard bleeds out.” He feels guilty for not pursuing him, for not knowing how serious it could have been. August lifts his chin to apologize - and finds Aghavni’s emerald eyes flashing with fury.
Anger is better, easier, than fear. He doesn’t move as she lays the blade of her fan along his cheek, the blood on it still warmer than the winter air; his nostrils flare at the sharp copper scent of it. If he were a hound he could hunt that scent - hell, if this were Denocte he could still find the boy. But August knows that in Solterra he is out of his depth.
He doesn’t spare a glance for the onlookers who are only growing in number; he is staring into her eyes, greener than anything he’s seen since leaving. And the little sun burned there, a fact he has always let himself forget. It serves as a good reminder now: she has been marked for this place since before they met.
“Why not both,” he says, and tries for a smile that comes out crooked. “Maybe I’m your eternal reward.” He thinks of how he must look - disheveled, sunburnt, hair stiff with salt - and smell, and the smile curls higher. “Or punishment.” August decides he’s had enough of standing at the sharp point of her fan; he tilts his head away, stepping in to embrace her. For a long moment he stands with his eyes shut tight, the ground steady beneath his feet, feeling them both breathe.
“You smell like home,” he murmurs into her ear, and feels his cheeks heat with a blush even as he fights the urge to bury his face in the curve of her neck, the tumble of her mane. He is still disoriented, he thinks; that’s why his heart feels like it’s constricting at the faint trace of the Scarab’s spice-and-sweet. August blinks and begins to pull away, and now his own neck and shoulder sport bright spots of blood.
His eyes catch on the tiny smashed galleon, so shattered he doesn’t recognize it as a ship. He takes a deep breath before searching out her gaze again. “Well, princess. You didn’t have to stage such a dramatic assassination attempt to convince me not to leave again. You could have just asked.”
If she had (why hadn’t she?) he doesn’t know what he would have said. His feelings for Solterra are mixed but all unpleasant; resentment for what it’s taken from him, pity, distaste for their wars and ways.
But now August is sure, with the kind of certainty he hasn’t felt in months, that he will not be seeing Denocte anytime soon.
August - -
there's a lover in the story but the story's still the same
rise like lions after slumber / in unvanquishable number / shake your chains to earth like dew / which in sleep had fallen on you
S
ometime between her falling and him catching her the sun has dipped an arm into the ocean, drowning the streets and everything in it in tides of violent red. Merchants cease their hawking and head home to their wives and hot dinners. Sailors stumble laughingly into dim taverns. Assassins detach themselves from the shadows and creep like cats into empty street corners.
A crowd has gathered around them. The whites of their eyes glow with ill-hidden curiosity, and even that is just a sweater pulled over the purring remnants of savagery. She knows Solterra too well to forget how blood attracts its children like sharks to the kill.
Numbly she returns her gaze to August, Denoctian-born August, and knows immediately it is a mistake. His pale, pale gaze holds hers captive, and as Aghavni tilts her chin up coolly, she can't help but think how unfair it is. How unfair he is. How could she stay angry when he looked at her like that? Her pulse flutters weakly in her chest, like a dove with a stunted wing. Harder and harder to kill.
"At least you know what you are," she says, and grimaces when it doesn't come close to enough. Angry enough. Unconcerned enough. She opens her mouth to say something else (something enough) but then—
He hugs her. And—baffled, furious, weary, relieved—she lets him.
In the waning light of a violent dusk, Aghavni's eyes glow green-red-green—eternal summer razed with forest fire. Shuddering, she folds into him like a storm collapsing, run ragged by her own tempest.
She has forgotten what it feels like to be hugged. Father never hugged her. Mother was dead, and corpses cannot hug the living. She had no one else. No one who came without motive, without jealousy, without revenge, without—You smell like home.
Home? Ah, she thinks, reverently. So that's what it was. It flows out of her with each new pulse like a strangled confession: I was lonely.
Fluttering her eyes shut, smelling the salt in his skin, she tries to tell herself that it is wrong. That this is exactly what she wanted to avoid, when she made the decision not to tell him. When she made the decision for him. (Like the hypocrite she is.) She was not a girl born to be virtuous. It was not written in her fate, like it was for the good and the holy and the ones who died to become Saints.
Perhaps that is why she is so bad at it.
You could've just asked, August says, and she shakes her head firmly. "I couldn't." When he draws away she stares at the blood streaked across his dappled shoulder, shaped like a vicious reminder. "I could tell, you know. That you wanted to leave." Her tone comes out too accusatory, too tender, made volatile by the fresh memory of being held. "That came out wrong," she winces, casting her eyes up to the sky in an attempt to stop their throbbing. "What I meant was—gods."
They are attracting too much attention. Eyes beam down at her like lenses over an ant, burning in their focused intensity. Barely bearable. Lips trembling, turning sharply on her heel, Aghavni wrests a chunk of August's mane with her telekinesis and pulls him after her, cagily ignoring murmuring onlookers, cutting through the crowd like she doesn't wish to be noticed.
She turns down an alley she only knows is there because she has walked into it twice in the span of an hour, searching for the harbors. Cats flee when they see her coming. The sun takes the last of its light away as it sinks into the depths of the sea. Her barely braided braid falls apart into a cascade of blood-streaked white when she whips her head towards August, a lone cactus half-buried by sand, lingering despondently in a corner, exploding into bloom.
"I know that if I asked you to come with me, here," she says, gesturing towards the sand, the palace (ivory towers in the distance), the blood, "you wouldn't have said no." She bites her cheek, hard, and folds down into the sand because she can't bring herself to look at him. Golden boy, even in the dark. Shoulder spattered by blood. "Because you don't know what it's like, Solterra, and—call me selfish, tell me I had no right, but—" her voice wobbles as she sucks in a breath, as she swallows down hot, hot tears.
"I didn't want you to find out."
Because Solterra scars all those it touches, August. Because me, my family—we are the worst, and you don't know it yet, and I don't—ever—want you to find out.
He might have laughed at that - at least you know what you are.Ah, but princess, he could have said (were there time, were they not drawing a crowd, were her blade not dimpling his skin, so near biting it) that’s exactly the trouble. She has always known who she is - Sol IV, rightful heir of an ancient kingdom - and August is no one, sure of nothing, for the first time in his life. A painful realization, hence the sea and the quarter-life crisis.
But none of that matters now, when she is real and warm and pressed against him. It had never really been about what he wanted, anyway, and perhaps that’s why he’s had so much difficulty deciding now. Protect her. His one true purpose, and instead he’d - he’d run away. Coward.
Everything is red-stained now, like a wash of watercolor over the city. She still looks beautiful, even cast in crimson, even with her hair in disarray and blood streaking her face and chest, a careless artist. Of course she has always been beautiful, but August has always thought of it matter-of-factly, a passionless truth. For some reason he’s unable to so now, and it only disorients him further.
This, he thinks, is why he’s never come to Solterra. Some premonition that it would ruin everything.
At least he is not the only one stumbling. He arches a brow at her, waiting for her to clarify, swallowing his own explanations. The crowd around them is not thinning as it should, and he follows her obligingly (though with a wince at the yank on his unbound hair), with guilt again nipping at him - he should have already gotten her somewhere safe, away from this dangerous scene. Never mind that he has no idea where he’s going here.
Following her through the throng at least feels familiar. So does the sword at his side, and he focuses on these two things as everything else around him continues to hold that slightly unreal quality, the dream-state. In the darkness of the alley her face hovers like a moon.
He doesn’t say anything, at first, because she is right. He would not have said no. And he could protest that with a thousand hypotheticals and still know the truth: he would have resented her for it, and always wondered, always wished himself elsewhere. August can’t bear to watch her fold her legs beneath her; it is too easy to superimpose the image of her collapsing, lungs vacant of air, green eyes vacant of sight. Instead he turns back toward the mouth of the alley, a darkening throat, making sure they aren’t followed.
Only when her voice wavers does he look back, and the sight of her there, lying like a child in a sandy forgotten alleyway, is enough to break his heart. She looks like an orphan, not a princess, or an emissary, or a queen.
“What,” he says, and his voice is steady and bright, a counterpoint to hers. “You think I can’t handle a little bit of sand? Sure, my hair my suffer for the heat, but it’s a dry heat. If it were humid, now -“ How easy it is, to fall back into pretending everything is fine; maybe that’s what they’ve always been best at. And maybe he realizes that, too, because he cuts himself off, and lowers his nose to her cheek.
“Aghavni. I know enough of what it’s like here. And isn’t that why you came in the first place, hasn’t that always been the purpose - to make it better?“
He knows it is. And that it’s a far more noble purpose than any he can pretend for himself, no matter how many times he runs away to the ocean, mopping poop decks and calling it adventure.
He tries to resist, but the last hour has weakened his resolve. Before he straightens again, August presses the ghost of a kiss to her forehead, just below the jut of her horn. When he looks away, toward the city, it’s as much to keep from seeing her expression as to hide whatever’s fighting in his own.
“When you’re ready,” he says brusquely, “I’ll escort you…wherever it is you’re staying now.” He can’t quite bring himself to say home. But he is smiling, when he glances back at her, a shadow on the sand, a girl who (he tells himself) still needs him after all. “And I really hope your city isn’t rationing water, because I haven’t bathed in weeks.”
August - -
there's a lover in the story but the story's still the same
rise like lions after slumber / in unvanquishable number / shake your chains to earth like dew / which in sleep had fallen on you
S
he remembered when she had first seen him, reed-thin and half-grown besides her father's proud, noble silence. His dull, pale coat bore the freshly-healed wounds of a fight, turned in his opponent's favor. His silvery hair was freshly washed and still damp, yet the edges of them were stained pink with old blood.
She had stepped out tentatively from the shadow of the stairway, careful to hold her head just so, to turn her eyes strange and cold, to keep her long hair fluttering behind—so she made a pretty picture. Minute adjustments, so ingrained by the shrill octaves of her aunts' instruction that she performed them without thinking, habit turned nervous tick.
She had curtsied deeply to her father ('how do you do.'), then stiffly to the nameless boy (hesitant silence). When she stood back up she had almost missed them—the eerie solidness of his gaze.
Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!
Eyes the silver of sea-nymphs. Eyes the luster of sea-change. She remembered thinking: Oh. This boy will never be mine.
"...hasn’t that always been the purpose - to make it better?"
"Sometimes I question if I have the right," she whispered into the sand, hating the tone of her voice. The metallic smell of the sea, red with blood, made her dizzy and heartbroken when he pressed a kiss to her forehead. She barely felt it, and it was agony, and it angered her in uneven turns. How much more she wanted from him, and how unfair it was, because he had always been the one giving.
All her life all she had done was take. Her mother's love. Her father's patience. August's kindness. Even Minya's fire—she had stolen pieces of it to turn her own, never caring enough for the fire-dancer, the phoenix; take away their flame, take away their life: and Minya was not immortal. Nor August. Nor Father.
Nor Mother.
She spat blood into the dunes when she stood, sand sticking to her skin in uneven patches. It paled her dusky coat; she glanced at August's shoulder, and stifled a mad laugh when she saw that they matched. "I'm ready," she said, light as a lie. "And a bath would do you good. I swear I've never seen you so unkempt," she commented stoically, before sweeping her hair into a bun at the base of her neck and stabbing it through with a needle-sharp pin. Her nose wrinkled when it scraped against skin; she had used too much force.
"I live in the castle, but I hardly recognize it. You'll see when you get there," she said dismissively. She had always thought she would enjoy showing him her old home. But swaying in the citadel's hostile mirage at high noon, moving down its cold halls and noting the placement of tapestries to hide the blood-spatter from a torn throat, smiling at chambermaids and armored guards with no return save a blank stare and an uneasy averting of the eyes—it shamed her. She did not know what he would think of it.
"But now," she continued, steering fluidly away from castles and her own misery, "you owe me all the stories of your travels. Were you ever cast overboard? Serenaded by sirens with little white shark's teeth? Tied to a mast by pirates disguised as the king's tradesmen?"
She kept her face perfectly serious, but her voice babbled with the airiness of a spring brook; it was a visceral change but done so honestly through the guise of youthful insouciance that it suddenly became difficult to remember the blood on her face and how moments ago she had been slumped in the sand like an orphan.
The mouth of the alley led out to the sea. As they stepped out, and Aghavni took in the endless depths of heartstopping blue, her gaze turned into something wistful. All her life she had been shuffled from one place to the next: the curtains of her caravans closed, night acting as a blanket between her and the shifting of the world. She would probably never sail out to sea.
She paused and turned fully towards August, seeking his eyes. They were as sea-changed and forlorn as they had been in her memories.
"August. There's nothing but empty rooms in the castle. If you need a place to stay for a few nights, or maybe more, no one will say a thing if you take one." She frowned and brushed a stray curl into her bun. Perhaps it was the stench of blood, or a pump of leftover adrenaline, but her stomach turned suddenly queasy, like she were jumping off from a cliff.
"What I am trying to say is, I wish you would stay. With me. If you would like."
Even as close as he is August almost misses it, the words that fall like a petal to the ground of the alley - but he doesn’t, and his ears twist back. For a moment he could feel the barbs in his mouth, sharp words to prick and cut with - but in the end he made his response desert-dry. “Yes, I’m sure Raum asked himself that same thing.”
It’s a good enough end-point to any conversation.
It is easier, when she stands and they’re both covered in sweat and blood and grit, like so many spars in years as faint as phantoms. Even easier, when they banter with their words in a way even more familiar. He watches her sweep her hair into a bun like he has a hundred times before, and waits for a feeling of de ja vu that doesn’t come. Maybe things are different now, he thinks - and wasn’t that the point?
“I suppose a castle is enough of an upgrade from a ship’s berth,” he says, matching the airiness of her tone, falling into easy step just behind her as they emerge from the alley’s mouth. When she asks for stories he procures a smile, another of the thousands he’s perfectly faked. “It’s no fun telling you if you’re just going to guess it all, Aghavni.” August sighs dramatically, even as he turns his own gaze to the sea, and where the unicorn’s turns wistful his own eyes only narrow, the flat silver of mirrors, or the surface of the sea.
He’d thought it would save him, or wash his true self toward him like a coral-encrusted sword turned up out of the surf. Instead, it had only brought him back here - to Solterra, to his princess’s side, to a role he had always played dutifully. He is about to say something else - some story from his time at sea, doubtlessly richly embroidered - when she says his name and his gaze is drawn to hers as inexorably as a tide to the moon, a thing to return to again and again.
August keeps his smile, now nothing but a curl of lips easy to lose in the deepening evening shadows. It isn’t until she continues that it fades, gone serious - an expression that has never suited him.
He already knows what his choice will be, even as he searches her emerald eyes for - what? Some sign that she’s offering more than she’s saying, that stay with me meant more than it always had? Of course his choice is what it always has been, though he tells himself that this is the first time it has ever been a choice at all, and surely that makes it different.
“As you wish,” he says, and his mouth curls like a fishhook into another smile. “Now, let me tell you about those sirens-" and he steps out into the street thick with shadows, with the light still on the sea, and waits for her to lead him to the castle.
@Aghavni
August - -
there's a lover in the story but the story's still the same
