aziel had visited the colosseum twice as a boy. And at first, he thinks of those gladiatorial memoirs as sharp.
It is not a haze but a map. Every cheer, every song, every surge of blood-drunk victory is etched into parchment only he can see. The wine ran red and smooth. His mother had worn her finest jewels, her finest lupine smile. The sun shone viciously under the weight of Solis' eye, as he watched his children die against his name. What a wonderful day! It's all there.
Or is it?
Wasn't that a different world? When the air felt heavy with an aurelian righteousness, when blood and gold were indistinguishable. When Solterra stood tall on the broken shoulders of a generation of slaves. If he thinks hard enough, if he looks in the right corners of his mind, he can see them now, where before they were merely essences in the fabric of a broader memory. Their faces evade him still, their eyes might have been any shade of blue, black, green, but their shadows remain -- as do the remnants of all blistering things. A body scorched by fire will leave a charcoal stain; oh he has seen it, smelt it. There were too many to count. Rats in cages, swarming in the flesh-eating noon-heat, flinching when the gates swung open and death knocked a little too keenly.
Why, then, were they a revision? How could he have failed so gravely to carve them into his memory in the same detail he had given nigh-on everything else?
Foolish questions. Naive and sour. Of course he knew.
Back then, their merit met not even the dirt on his hound's feet. They were an abstraction, a nothingness in the frame of his grand measureless existence. They were not living breathing souls but pieces of recycled plastic to be toyed with and discarded; they were not even worth the armour on their overdrawn bones, if they were so lucky to be awarded such.
How many lifetimes hide under his skin?
He stands now in the shade of Solterra's greatest arena, listening to the crowds as they begin to gather once more, smiling grimly to himself at the ludicrousness of it all. Time is a flat circle and this desert kingdom is more cyclical than most. The warriors might be different -- they might have their own names, their own freedoms, but the sentiment was still the same. They would die like small black beetles on the floor of that theatre and in years to come nobody would remember their faces, either.
Raziel does not wonder if his opinion of slavery, of the lowrun life that hums in the capitol's gutter, has changed.
An optimist, ever hopeful in their quest for such rare faith, would say yes. How could it not?
ghavni often wonders if it was a curse or a blessing to have been born into the eclipse of the monarchy.
Should she be thankful that the kingdom she has—had—been slated to rule, one day, was to her like a charcoal rendering of a storybook kingdom than anything close to the real thing? That, even after all she'd read, all she'd gathered, all she'd tried—she remembers near nothing about it?
Is she, somehow, better off than the Hajakhas, or the Azhades, or the Ieshans, or the Sevettas, that had been born early enough to remember? A monarchy in splendour, even if that splendour had been built on the broken backs of thousands. Gold treasuries. Silver collars. Gladiators in pits. Gladiators in graves.
Everything, except for love, aplenty. (But in Solterra, love has always been scarcer than water. So that is not anything different.)
So far, Aghavni has kept herself busy enough to refuse the halfhearted invitations back to the Hajakhan estate. Were it not for appearances they would not want her back, and anyway she did not want to be back. Did not want to see the little silk fans her aunts hid their sneers and backhanded compliments behind, or feel the eyes of the portraits mocking her as they marched down golden hallways like soldiers locked in two-step, or turn a bezelled corner and find a portrait of her mother staring back like a tawny-eyed hound, splayed on a bed of roses, eyes as dead as the boy besides hers.
She doesn't like to see her mother like that. Like Zolin's sister. Because, you see, Aghavni has her mother's face, and by extension—
a little of her uncle's, too.
***
The Colosseum is just as I remember it.
She wishes she can think this as her steps echo down through centuries of fallen monarchies, hundreds of chipped stone columns, and layers of blood packed down into earthen floor.
Before this day, Aghavni has never been inside.
She tries to tell herself there is not much to see, but the lie would be plain for the way she lifts her head to the sky (a blue circle, far above) and grits her teeth to keep from gaping.
If I screamed, she thinks, it would be swallowed up by the sheer enormity of this place. Rows and rows of seating fan outwards around the arena like an accordion, ascending half of the way up to Solis. Rusty metal cages buried by sand and time station themselves like guards in every pitted corner. Hallways as wide as cave mouths lead into darkness and end, she knows, in weaponries or seedy bars or slats of raised earth kept warm by bloody bodies.
She has read the books. She has seen the drawings. But without memory to sully the sight—
Aghavni stares, in astonishment and wonder.
But there is a time for gaping, and there is a time for investigation. She had not come today for the first. She had come to inquire into the illegal fighting ring she knew had started up again, like a cicada digging itself out of seven years of slumber, with the intention of waking the whole world up with it. She had come to ask the right people the right questions, and then to decide, when she made it back to the castle, whether Orestes needed to know about it or not.
Her fan flicks open in front of her face, blade-side glinting, red silk bleeding, when she catches someone looking too long at her. Quickly, she ducks into the nearest row. Recognition by the wrong sort could jeopardize her entire mission.
Her neck lolls as she sinks into the seat and bites back a sigh, wondering if she'll be able to hear herself think in the roar of the crowd. There is movement on the sands below, but she is too far up to see who has just entered the ring. Instead, Aghavni peeks to her right and stills when she catches sight of a dark head, and then below that, rivers of gold flowing from cracks in the steel-polished skin.
It can't be. Her mouth tips into a quicksilver smile. In a blink, she has pushed herself down the row, until her horn is just shy of nipping his shoulder. "Nazaret?"
He is just as I remember him, she thinks, and this time it is not a wish, but true.
§
You're scared to win, scared to lose
I've heard the war was over if you really choose
weat penetrates the smell of generously applied perfume, making fools of those who care too much for appearances and too little for common sense. It is not a pleasant marriage, even less so when the blood-toll bowls between them like a whore down to her last dime. The odorous amalgamation stings Raziel's nose and he shoots Gahenna a scornful glance - did it always smell this fucking bad? She laughs in the way only a dog can.
The pair snake their way through the bodies, angling toward a row that seems sparsely occupied.
Raziel is hungry and not for food. There is something purgative here, in an amphitheatre that houses a slaughterous nation and he is not exempt. He never has been. To watch these men die is more than entertainment; (if it ever was) it is communion. It takes his pain like consecrated bread and breaks it in two. The blood, the bones, the brutality: it is sacrament and he is anointed by the sound of their screams.
For there is history in his lungs and misery in his heart.
The unicorn sinks into his seat with Gahenna spilling out like black booze at his feet. They wait silently, heads bowed as if in prayer. To who? Solis? The sun god has no hands left to hold. He is black, black and charred all the way through.
"Nazaret?"
It shouldn't come as a surprise to be recognised; the Nazaret family were at one point wealthier than both the Azhade and Ieshan combined and were subsequently just as influential. But that had been decades ago; a time before Raziel's birth he had studied in historical tomes. Since the reign of Lady Marcissa Arisetta, and the declining health of Raziel's grandfather, the cartographers had withdrawn into themselves. Saudagar was an amaranthine sanctuary.
But surprised he is, to turn and face a girl with manzanilla-olive eyes and long hair strung up tight by spines that reminded him of teeth. Her horn leans in and had she been an inch closer his own might have tapped against it as though they were porpoises hemmed into a net. Gahenna smiles to herself. She remembers this girl. Raziel, with a head full of violence, struggles.
And then Aghavni tilts her head back, blinks, and thinks: Oh.
Of course he wouldn't, when she has changed so much. When her hair is not black like spilled ink but its glamorous inverse: moon-pale, glacial, the Weaver's signature platinum. When her eyes are not a mousy, dovey grey but green like absinthe, green like envy, green like emeralds, mined from the heart of the earth.
She would think he'd at least know her face, but then, they had all been children and—her eyes flicker up to his, purple as an emperor's robe—he was not his brother, Raoul.
Aghavni remembers little about the eclipse that was her childhood. She had been but a tiny thing, unsteady on her legs, foal's down for fur, owlish in the eyes; adamant to stick to the other noble spawn like a burr that couldn't even sting. But she remembers the Nazarets, because they had not been one of the Four and to Mother that was as much a declaration of alliance she could ever hope for—and she remembers the brothers Raziel and Raoul.
She glances down to the hellhound sprawled luxuriously at Raziel's hooves, into her spectre-white eyes, and thinks: And I remember you, too.
"Gahenna," she says, her smile glancing. The roaring of the crowd nearly drowns it, but Aghavni knows that the hound, at least, will hear.
Mother had been so worried about leaving her alone with them, the famed hellhounds of Nazaret. If Aghavni closes her eyes she can still remember slivers of the memory, her mother's voice tinny and hollow, a voice stolen out of a dream.
"Sol, you may play with the twins but you must not pet their hounds." A bubble of laughter from a woman curled on a beaded cushion besides her mother. Zophia... will you raise a Hajakha that way?...
Aghavni slides herself ever further down the polished stone, finished in a mirror-like shine, until her shoulder barely skims Raziel's. Gold leaks slow, like thickened blood, from a crack in his chromium skin. Biting her cheek, she considers: she did not use to be so—dismissive—of breaching what had been, to her, the minimum amount of space required between oneself and another, for those born to the old nobility. Father had observed it as strict as a military man—Charon, as strict as a servant bound to a military man—and Mother, because she was a full-blooded Hajakha.
Touching her was like touching the sun.
And yet, Aghavni thinks, They killed her anyway.
So it goes.
But then she smiles, wide and full, because she must have been meant to meet the last son of Balsheva Nazaret in such an unholy place for good reason. His aunt, that snake, was giving her so much trouble at court. Their meeting, Aghavni is beginning to believe, must be what the gods-sworn and the desperate call fate.
So she lifts her head up, up, up, until her mouth is just shy of his ear: "Have you forgotten me, Raziel?" she whispers, "I am Sol Hajakha."
♕
oh, you clever little things
the sycophantic teens
here were not many Nazarets left. Seven to be exact -- though one did not count. Raziel could never remember her name. Was it Delia? Daya? Something beginning with D. Anyway, she was a bastard. According to Raoul (and his no doubt duplicitous sources) their aunt, Hosana, had spent the night with a soothsayer on the edge of the desert soon after her second birthday; unmarried and underage. He'd also overheard one of the butlers furtively broadcasting another version to the kitchen staff -- this one involved Raziel's own grandfather. He remembers wrinkling his nose. Over the years many stories circulated the city but once the girl was born and turned out to be positively ordinary (lacking disfigurement or conjury) the rabble lost interest. By the end it was determined that she was simply a mistake, nothing more.
So six, if you discount his half-cousin whose name escapes both of us. Poor duck.
The most prominent of the six? Yamuna Nazaret. As the middle child of Elazar's three daughters, Yamuna had lived in Balsheva's shadow for years. That was, until she died. After the tragedy, Yamuna had worn black for just forty-eight hours, breaking the customary one month minimum, and Raziel can still recall the way she had cried a little too grandly at her husband's funeral. Everything about Yamuna was exaggerated: her garish canary-yellow corsets, her viciously-short buzzcut, her gold-on-silver teeth. The woman had assumed position as head of house faster than a peasant could say fuck Zolin and there she had stayed, like a splinter or a cockroach. Or both.
In any case, all of this lead Raziel to consider the likelihood of this stranger mistaking him for someone else in his family. Well, he wasn't a woman and he looked nothing like his male cousins. Slim, then. By no choice of his own they are even closer now and the sable unicorn does not hesitate to lean away from her as though wary of catching... something. Intimacy wasn't a flavour he liked the taste of.
There is an echo of familiarity in the way the girl moves; a thought that has lost its way. It is fig-sweet and practised: a signature of the highborne. Gahenna rests her great obsidian skull upon her left paw, almost rolling her eyes: come on, Raz. The stallion swings his tail in languid annoyance. Has he become truly so detached that he cannot recognise an old face? When she leans in, smelling of magnolia and linen and summer-dusk, he does not realise he is holding his breath.
Sol Hajakha.
Morsels of the past drain through the tide of forgotten memories, soft and worn. They flash in colour, screening a dead world behind his eyes in short sharp bursts that end too soon for his cavernous heart to bear. And she is there: in the sand, with hair that might have been Caligo's and a laugh that could have been a hymn. At Raoul's side. Raziel sighs, releasing himself from a childhood he can only wish to forget. He straightens, "you look different." It is a stupid thing to say, he knows, but maybe he is just that: stupid and sad and never, ever sorry. Zolin's niece sits at his shoulder and somehow it feels, quite suddenly, like home. They glimmer in the noon-light, hangovers of an age where money talked and power sang and life was one long sordid carnival.
"I thought you were dead." His voice is flat like stone as he stares into the pit. The cages open and the crowd begins to swell.
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