The day, gray and cold and bitter as old paper, passes first through time, then through memory, as if it had never happened at all. Magic settles to a dull hum in the back of his head where he tastes it between his tongue and his throat but cannot feel it, crackling over his skin like-- well, electricity. From day to day life becomes dull and bland and empty and Andras himself becomes a knot of ugly anger and frustration that sits in the pit of him like a heavy, black rock.
At some point between then and now, the dam breaks. There is no investigation, no murder, no kindom, no king, no catastrophic and tangible fear that screams louder than the hissing of snakes. Andras cannot focus, cannot search, cannot do anything because he is raw and angry and obsessed preoccupied.
So he leaves.
As if he is nothing. As if his country is nothing. As if everything is not chaos and he is not perched in the center of it, buffeted on all sides by the winds of fear and murder and the persistent and ever-louder question of who? A day trip, he tells himself. Just a chance to stretch his wings. He stretches his wings so far that the sea of spring grass gives way to dry, brown blades which in turn give way to the baked sand of the Mors. He eyes it, waves of deep red smeared into the dusty yellow, blue-gray shadows cast on the backside of each dune.
Andras clenches his teeth. Andras tells himself no, no, no until his hooves scuff on the street and it is too solid a feeling close his eyes and wish away-- but still he does. The gate to the city creaks as it opens, a loud, sort of aching noise that echoes the one his heart is making as it claws its way up his throat and into his mouth.
He doesn't realize he's holding his breath.
sleep like dead men, wake up like dead men
let this whole town hear your knuckles crack
too strung out on compliments overdosed on confidence
I don’t really give a shit about spring. I’m just happy we’re one step closer to summer.
The sun is out today, and I am splayed like a cat over the warm cobblestones of our rooftop deck. Below me, our courtyard is bustling quietly with the movement of servants watering the snake plants, grinding spices, or pouring tea; the streets just beyond our gates are filled with the muffled ruckus of merchants and their customers, who bicker like children over the price of this or that exotic fruit. I am happily silent, laid out in an easy arc. The sky is only barely dusted by clouds.
When I close my eyes against the light, they don’t go black. In fact, I can still see. But instead of the natural world, it is Solis’ best painting, a kaleidoscope of washed out green and crimson and purple whose swirls and sudden divisions I watch with undivided concentration.
The sun is melting and melting and melting me. I am falling into an uncannily good mood. Someone is playing the harp downstairs, an old, old song my mother taught us all as a lullaby. The awkward pacing of the player tells me it’s probably Adonai, slowly—so slowly—relearning his strings. It is a lonely, plaintive sound, one note playedI want to smile, but I cannot. Even I am not so cruel.
For once I feel at home. For once I am pleased not to hear myself talk, distracted instead by the slow simmer of my dark skin and the gentle humming of the snakes against my ears; distracted by the way the sun brushes over my cheek, plays tricks on my vision; distracted by the sound of the bell clinking.
The bell.
I sit up abruptly, so fast my head goes briefly swimming-dark. My heart rushes forth. The bell only rings when the gates are opened: it’s a noise I have trained myself to recognize.
Our House is situated right at the edge of the capitol, where we can see—especially from my vantage point—everyone who passes in and out of the city of Solterra, keeping the census up to date, stocking the city’s market stalls. I wish I wouldn’t leave the good sunspot open for one of my siblings to take, but my curiosity is stronger than my laziness; I shake the kinks and curls out of my snakes and roll to my feet to peer over the edge of the deck.
Past the courtyard, past our own iron-wrought gates, there is movement as the guards let some stranger into the main street. And I recognize him, but I have no idea which name to use. For a moment I freeze. I am only a little bit afraid of heights.
“Warden,” I call out from above, though I know I will not look, to him, like an angel.
The city cracks open like an egg, spilling light and sound that ratchets his jaw another degree tighter.
Andras was made for Delumine, for its gray fog and tall trees and the uncanny hush of a country in mourning from the day it was born to the day it dies. He is made for the churchlike silence of the library, light falling in slanted yellow shafts on the knotted wood floor. Solterra is busy, the sort of frantic buzzing that comes with a market state: the mulling of crowds, exchanging of goods, the dark hoods of cons and pickpockets that leer at him from their corners and canopies.
The shadow of the gate falls across his back in a long, blue-gray block that is at once warm and not warm enough. Andras' teeth hurt. His knees ache. The breath he had held splits itself between his nose and his teeth, a wet hiss.
A guard shuts the gate behind him, creaking like a sunken ship.
Andras wonders why he feels like an animal in a cage, desperate to get out the second the door closes. His heart is just starting to lift a hand to rattle the bars when a voice says, 'Warden.'
A bolt of blue light crackles across the wings folded neatly over his back. The voice is a sound he would know sleeping, a sound he would know if he did not know his own name.
It can't be this easy. It can't be this easy.
Andras knows that to tilt his head back, turn his throat to the sun and catch the light on the rim of his glasses is a death sentence, or at least something close. Lately everything feels like death after death after death, so it would come as no surprise. He chooses not to recognize the buoyant something that rises to meet the sudden, crushing panic that grips him. It all feels very cliche, on his figurative knees in the street, aching up at the balcony with his heart in his throat. It's easier to look at him, this far away. It's easier to breathe, to think.
And he thinks, Oriens help me. "Andras." he offers, finally. "Let me in."
sleep like dead men, wake up like dead men
let this whole town hear your knuckles crack
He looks small from here (although—isn’t he always?)
I glance down at him. He is a blemish on my city, a black mark on the golden cobblestone. A blue arc of electricity blooms into existence, forking, rising, spilling over his dark skin and rattling, shaking, as if something is about to explode forth: it lets out a dry hiss, a kind of crackling like bones breaking or reforming or just shifting around, and for a brief moment I am stunned into silence by the way the cyan light plays over his skin like sunlight on water, like red on roses. The sound of it like glass breaking.
I chew the inside of my cheek and taste salt, iron, wanting.
His whole body burns with light. All the sharp edges of it catch sunlight and reflect it back; the slanted rise of his narrow shoulders, the thin, metallic curve of his glasses, the jut of a knifish hip. Why is he so cutting? When I look at him I am a little afraid, not of what he could do to me but what I could do to him—cut or break or shatter, with a little more than a kiss. Something nervous rises and takes flight in my chest, beats its wings up into my throat. (And whose wings are those?)
A sharp, brief pain. One of the snakes has nipped impatiently at my ear, which flickers wildly in indignance and incites the noise of a little squeak that I am glad my guest cannot hear (maybe gladder than I’ve ever been of anything in my entire life). But I know the game. I know they are as impatient as I am, just a little quieter about it. I know what it means to feel that little bite. And maybe I’m a little irked that someone so small can boss me around, but when he says his name—
Andras, not Warden—when I hear his voice, the little strain of it, the half-beg (I would like to think it is a beg) to let him in—
Of course I do it.
With a short huff I turn back into the house and prance down the winding staircase, out of the front door; into the courtyard, which is still quite active with the movement of gardeners and servants boiling honey tea; then through the lawn, deep yellow-green with a crown of bluebells and ropes of brittlebush, to the wrought-iron gate that I push open without much fanfare and let swing toward him.
I don’t even really thing about it—the repercussions, what I might give up by letting him in. It doesn’t seem to matter. He is already here, all the way from Delumine. We are already face to face. Without the lace of the fence between us, I am once again distracted by the almost-blue of his eyes, the soft downturn of his mouth, the way he still smells like the forest even after leaving it so far behind—the flash of white on his lip, the matching slash folded into his wing.
“Or what?” I challenge, half-smiling; the voice and the expression feel good, almost too natural. My stomach turns.
Let me in. He is surprised when it is more than a whisper. It feels like it barely leaves his mouth at all, caught in his throat like the breath that follows.
Pilate huffs--from here just the sharp rise and fall of his shoulders, the indignant twist of his head that makes Andras' mouth twitch--and Andras watches the doorway swallow him whole.
He tries to force patience (something he has never really had), tongue pushed up to the back of his teeth. But patience does not come easily, and Andras is still as a housecat, waiting in rapt silence, straining to hear the tap, tap, tap of approaching footsteps. Maybe there should be uncertainty in him. Maybe he should think, if? and not when? but he doesn't. Andras chews the inside of his lip in thought.
He knows, somehow. The if never enters his mind. When the door opens, and then the gate, Andras is shocked by the certainty with which he meets it. He is stilll chewing the inside of his lip when their eyes meet, close enough now to see each molten string of his irises, the light on his scales that squeezes the warden's chest with an unkind sort of severity. For a moment that something rears its ugly head, soft and comfortable and desperate skidding across the black, black skin of his fear-need-hatred and then gone just as fast as it came.
Andras hate this. The something. Maybe more than he hates the self-satisfied half-smile that makes his stomach snarl.
"Or what?" Pilate purrs.
Another sharp fork of electricity pops off the point of his hip. He smiles like the dead of night, like a threat, like a kiss--eyes narrowed, full of his own electric hum--and steps through the gate. There is nothing but the shifting light of his glasses to betray the glance that says--
We'll see.
Pilate's world is so full of color and light - green cut through with blots of yellow and blue, the panels of sheer curtain piled over every window. The gate itself, wrought-iron and heavy as the rock in his stomach, is more of a work of art than anything else. The clatter of work, the sigh of opulence--it is just as loud as his electric hum.
Suddenly, Andras feels very, very small. He sort of looks it, too. "This is..." and he searches, for some word that makes him feel bigger, chases away the trapped-animal feeling in him. "what I expected."
One last spark, barely there at all except for the sound it makes, a crackle that's no more than a groan. Fitting, probably. His mouth is dry. He doesn't realize until far too late that the drum of his magic is not that at all, it is his heart, pounding and pounding and pounding. "Well?" he asks. "Show me who you are."
sleep like dead men, wake up like dead men
let this whole town hear your knuckles crack
Through the artfully wrought net of the iron gate, Andras is split into parts: a dark eye, a white lip, a stubbornly hunching shoulder. I watch each piece with the same religious attention. A raised brow. The twitch of his mouth, which carries the same startling, ugly intensity as any spoken threat.
If I am cowardly, if I am a bastard, or selfish, or traitorous, then at least I am still patient. This has never been a problem for me, the waiting of it. I am watching and watching and watching his silence, the slow cast of doubt over his face, watching the stillness of the world uncut by noise as we both wait in stubborn silence for the other to crack first.
I think more of me is snake than anyone wants to admit.
I step back to let the gate swing open. Overhead the sun is high in a cloudless sky; it turns the world to gauzy gold and casts glitter on every piece of metal in here. Some part of me is curious what he thinks, but I would not go so far as to call it worried, because I know it is not this house that will make or break his opinion of me. (I am not worried because I know, no matter what I do, I am in charge. He would not fight if I decided I would like to crush him.)
But still something in me is pleased at the way he looks around, kind of reverent. I am not surprised; it is quite different from the hovels that those Dawn people call homes. The walls are high, smooth, white marble, and underfoot the patio is covered in tiles which are patterned with increasingly intricate swirls and dips of deep-red and gold. There are plants everywhere, something I thought would let the other houses know we are not struggling—how else could we afford to waste so much water on that kind of luxury? Snake plants with glossy dark-green leaves, carefully trimmed bushes of blue and purple flowers, rose-tinged prickly pear leaves. My room is worse, almost. I don’t know why I care about them at all.
A mild blue spark peels off the Warden’s hip as he joins me in the courtyard, and for a brief moment I wonder, if I touched it, how bad the repercussions would be. Show me who you are, he says then, as if he has the right to ask me for anything at all. I squint, partially to avoid the sharp rods of sunlight as they come down, partially in incredulity. But he’s not joking.
I snort. I want to say something, something cutting—you came all the way here for that?—but I know, if I did try to say something, it would come out: you already know who I am?
So I swallow my pride, which tastes like vitriol, which tastes like vinegar. I snap my tail lightly against the leg of his which stands closest to me and say in a tone of resigned boredom: “Fine. Drink first.”
The servants see me host guests often, but they never seem to stop caring about who I bring, and where, and why; they watch curiously, with sly, narrowed eyes, as I lead the Warden through the glimmering courtyard and toward the mansion.
Certainty can be dangerous. Almost always.
Animals are uncertain because it means they survive. Animals hesitate because to do anything else means a mouth full of teeth, crushing.
Then, it was dangerous. When Pilate looked at Andras like a man on fire, punching a hole in each peal of thunder, daring Andras and his black something to come out in the open, instincts be damned. And now, certainly, when Andras turns back to that infurating, diplomatic patience and he has never been so certain in his life that he has seen this decadence all along.
It's been there, hasn't it? In the sharp cut of Pilate's smile, in the shine of each smooth angle, in each languid stride and each barely-murmured threat-dare-promise. He isn't surprised to find the impossibly green leaves, backlit by the dry marble of the architecture or the cloudless sky behind that. He isn't surprised to feel eyes on him, boring holes in the back his neck. He wonders what he's thinking. He hopes it's something besides that smug smile.
When he turns, he finds indignation - brows drawn together just enough to crease the skin, the slice of his pupils as dark and as hot as Andras has ever been. There is a long moment where he seems lost for words, and the warden sucks in a breath that's a little too loud for his liking.
It makes him smile.
The kind of smile that is almost entirely unwholesome, the kind of smile that in and of itself begs Andras to place his hands on the crumbling wall of Pilate's tolerance and push, just enough to feel it give way, just enough to see if there is anything like him behind all that polished marble and gold filigree.
Drinks first, Pilate says - and Andras thinks he knows better than to believe the disinterest, but who knows. He answers, "Sure." with a shrug.
But there is a part of Andras, growing by the second, that knows it wouldn't be enough. If he pushed he would never stop, so when Pilate's tail slaps his knee he follows like he always would have, crackling away as each pair of eyes sticks to his skin, one by one.
"So." he begins, when they have crossed the courtyard and it sits in a hush behind them, the prying eyes of servants turning from their charge and his guest to each other, and the noise of their gossip rises up in their wake. And he wants to say pour me a drink, in fact his jaw clenches with the effort it takes not to push, and push, and pushpushpush even though he had just decided against it, but in the end, he says:
"Are you surprised?"
Andras is surprised.
sleep like dead men, wake up like dead men
let this whole town hear your knuckles crack
Everywhere I look there is a new glimmer of sunlight—caught on the silvery crash of burbling water in our fountain; the droplets that cascade down the marble sides of it; on the many panes of polished glass, the crowns of dark green leaves; the tremblingly tall stacks of filigreed china teacups, the gold clasp that lays flat against my chest.
This is what it feels like to be home. Opulence everywhere. Andras smells like Dawn, a sappy, sharp pine-scent that makes me want to sneeze in indignation, not nearly the sweet kind of perfume I’m used to. Maybe that’s why I’m so attracted to it. Maybe that’s why it’s so distracting—everything is right and relevant except this: the insistent crackling of electricity that spills onto me from Andras’ wings, the scent on his skin of trees and moss and deep-dark water.
I force myself to look ahead. I’m grinding my jaw, keeping my head down as the sound of hissing grows louder and louder in the shell of my ear. When I huff out a breath, it’s so deep it makes my chest ache. The servants are still watching.
Andras says sure, like I knew he would. A part of a smile flashes across my mouth; I tuck it closer to my chest, maybe trying to hide it (though not trying very hard).
Then we are winding out of the sun-splashed courtyard away from the warm air, ducking into the cold embrace of the shaded corridors which bristle with the outstretched arms of so many plants. I sidle a little closer to my guest, until our shoulders might brush. And then we plunge through the drawing room, brimming with ornately woven rugs, plush chairs, and trembling towers of hard-bound books, and then finally into the kitchen, which is still quite active with cooks preparing breakfast, steeping tea and slicing fruit.
The clatter of dishes and running water is a balm to me, the same soft collection of noises that has lulled me to sleep and woken me up since childhood. I find us two generously polished glasses, stock them with ice, and pour each of us a neat shot. Sunlight streams in through the starboard window; I screw my right eye up against the glare, trying instead to focus on the way Andras stares at me—jaw clenched like he's trying to hold something in, eyes flashing like fireworks, like he's pushing something down.
I smile, though only halfway. Are you surprised? the warden asks.
"No," I answer. Simple. Clean. Biting back a lazy grin, I take the first sip.
It feels like a dream until the shade touches his forehead and the dive in temperature brings him back to the tick of their feet echoed off gold-plated furniture knobs and the ring of high ceilings, muffled only by a shuffling murmur in the background and the somehow comforting drum and hiss of plates being made and set and carried. The smell of sweet bread and juice squeezed fresh from the food is almost too much with anything else.
He wonders why he is drawn, always, from the dark hole of his room in a library in the middle of the woods, where voices are hushed and unhurried and the silent panic of a nation is almost a comfort, hung over his back like a blanket.
As they cross the threshold to the kitchen he thinks how much like him Pilate must look, with his jaw wrenched tight, breathing like he'll hollow himself out, like breathing at all will untie the knot in him. Pilate turns his back on Andras to pluck two glasses out of god knows where, and Andras thinks--if he were to reach out, to touch him, would Pilate flinch, now? If he stretched one wing, hooked its feathers in the fabric of his cloak or the cold glint of his gold chain-- what then?
It's a thought that has his heart racing, a private moment that Andras shares (unwillingly) with the hungry-eyed servants and their urgent whispering before Pilate hands him a glass that tinkles as it changes hands. He smiles, thin and tight-lipped, and curses that fucking smile for the third time that morning.
The light through the window, the wrinkle of his eyelid, half-closed against it, and the other one, bright like most dangerous things, searching his face for something Andras is almost certain he'll find there--all of it makes his mouth dry.
No, Pilate hums. Andras glares at him, a look that moves eyes-mouth-glass-eyes, then sips his own, the cold rim of the glass turned blue by the fingers of light that walk their way down the stiff lines of his neck. "Mm," he hums in agreement, and the smile that follows it is uncharacteristically calm. "What does surprise you? I sincerely doubt it's drinks."
I have never liked to leave home. Why should I, when home is like this?—
Clean. Luxurious. Not so difficult to enjoy, not incapable of pleasing even the most critical guess. There is no sound but Andras’ gritted breath, the clinking of crystal-clear ice cubes. The gentle rustle of palm fronds swaying, against one another and the carefully carved slabs of marble, which against all odds remain cool under the sun. Why should I leave home when the whole world here is inlaid with gold, where servants can wait on my hand at foot?
Only once has that privilege felt choking. Only once, and we don’t talk about it.
I swallow hard. For a moment, my attention wavers—my eyes drop from Andras’ and settle on the empty doorway behind him. In the arch of it, surrounded by palm fronds, I think I can almost imagine Adonai, as strong and tall as he used to be: he is staring at me with cold silver eyes, wearing the expression of smug disappointment that used to stick to him like a tattoo.
One of the snakes nips elegantly at the base of my ear. I flinch, blink, and Adonai is gone (as if he were ever there). My drink is empty. My mouth feels cold and awkward, still holding ice cubes, when I shake my head and can focus again despite the rattle in my teeth.
Andras looks at me like a science experiment. I don’t think I care. Better to be observed than ignored, especially at a time like this. His gaze follows a pattern as precise as any map: eyes, mouth, glass, eyes—and I make sure to smirk when it lands on my mouth, offering the faintest, most satisfied curl of the lips. Because I know it will anger him. Because I know it will kill him, just a little.
“Nothing surprises me.” Unselfconsciously, I spit a now-small spear of ice back into my empty cup. Sunlight shines bright as diamonds off the rim of glass. “Except you being nice, maybe. That would do it.” Half a dry smile rises to meet my face, but this time it is the result of real pleasure, real amusement—I am wound up, cagey with earnestness to see how he’ll respond.
This game is my favorite. Half-dream and half-prophecy.
