he truth is, Adonai, parties have never been my thing.
I might have written you that. But writing is not within my forte, either. No. I have always been an individual of incredible, decisive action. It is what made me so successive as a captain; and what condemned me as a man.
Tonight, my actions are simple. The best ones typically are. In war, the over-complicated strategies are destined to fail; only the most clever, the most straightforward, have any chance of surviving first contact. So, the course of action:
Talk to Adonai. There is no requirement for the conversation. The memory of our first interaction remains enough to make my flesh burn and my mind to prick with intrigue. A cursed prince.
I know nothing of princes, and my ignorance is something I cannot stand. Tonight, if nothing else, I may come to understand the dual coin of royalty and soldiery—a lifelong knowledge that I have nursed since boyhood and only now may comprehend.
I walk through the Hall of Statues and am reminded of Delumine’s garden.
But those statues had been immersed in bursting, vibrant foliage. These stand alone; I find them haunting. I have never been exposed to art, at least not in this magnitude. The only place in Oresziah decorated with any degree of refinement had been the church, where the stained glass had bled with the setting sun.
It does not take me long to find the golden Prince. He shuffles—doing his best, I suppose, to hide the lethargic gait—among patrons, and smiles politely when they ask questions. He looks as if he belongs there; as if an artist, perhaps the De Clare fellow I continue to hear whispered, could transform him into a gilded statue with a single touch. With that kind of beauty comes a certain fragility; a certain inescapable essence.
In that moment I decide he is better than the rest of us, and the decision nearly makes my approach impossible—but I cannot refrain from touching someone so dove-like, so brilliant, as if that purity might rub off onto me. If only I can touch it; if only grasp it, for a transient moment... I know the long road of suffering; I have walked it many times. And seeing Adonai excites in me the same excitement as a man drowning who sees the shore; even the idea of touching salvation is enough to salvage my misery, transform it into hope. Perhaps he could take the pain away. Perhaps he is different.
And so I delve into the crowd, taking two bubbling drinks from a tray as I pass by a server.
I approach from behind, as lions do; and stop close enough for my breath to gust against Adonai’s ear, fluttering the fur of his cloak.
“My Prince, you have quite an impressive… hawk.” The innuendo is utterly brazen and inappropriate. I pull away with a smile that belongs to Lucifer as he fell. “You invited me. Hopefully you don’t regret it, and I don’t disappoint.”
§
True it never was, Yet because they loved, it was a pure creature.
They left it room enough. And in that space, clear and un-peopled,
it raised its head lightly and scarcely needed being.
They didn’t nourish it with food, but only with the possibility of being.
And that gave the creature so much power.
tilt my head back and drain the swirling green-and-silver drink I'd gotten from Pilate's bar—green, of course, for absinthe; I'd made sure he saw me choose it, before I'd tugged my lips into an echoic smile and greeted him warmly in front of his guests—and suppress a gag as the liquor goes down like a mouthful of lemons.
Irony? Hardly.
I am about to place the emptied goblet on a passing server's tray when my lungs contract in a fit of coughs. Swiftly, anticipating it, I jerk my head to my shoulder and Father’s fur cloak muffles it all to silence. I lift my head and chuckle lightly; tears blur my vision into streaks of vibrant color.
There is another advantage to wearing this cloak besides the look of it: the wolf-fur ruff is so thick that I can easily smother my coughs in its plush grey depths.
“Don't—look so frightened,” I murmur hoarsely to the aghast server, who looks barely old enough to be handling drinks. From the back, I merely appear like I am conversing with him. As for the boy himself, I wave off his anxious inquiries and, when I am able to speak in more than fragments again, instruct for him to leave the goblet very gently with the soiled silverware in the kitchens, as it was apart of a set of imported Denoctian crystal made-to-order for House Ieshan.
Not that Pilate would care.
Somehow, though I do not really remember how, I make it back to the hall of statues. Pilate's cocktail is starting to affect me, I think, though I am still not certain exactly how. I am resting in the shadow of a particularly massive sculpt—a rearing stallion in a typical hero's stance, yet the hair, I suppose, is rendered finely enough—when I see him.
Vercingtorix.
I barely suppress my grin. He is gold all over, a brighter, bolder shade than mine, and the reflecting mirrors in the room only make him more so. The black gazelle horns that crown his head like sabers shine darkly; pale spots gleam down his sides, the inverse of Corradh's; his hair is done in the style I had first seen him in, though maybe it is neater, or maybe I am projecting.
The point is that he is striking in all the ways I am not.
If the rearing stallion's sculptor had used Torix as his model, the resulting creation would surely have become his magnum opus. At the very least, it would've given me something to admire at my leisure, instead of in cool feints of barely-there glances.
I had wondered if he would show. Abaddon had flown directly back to the aviary out of hawkish spite, and I had not gone over to check if he had brought back a reply. One meeting is not nearly enough, even for an Ieshan, to guarantee a second; or perhaps I am merely less Ieshan than the rest of them.
That is always a possibility.
Yet, before I can properly indulge in what I allow myself to think of as a small victory, a guest finds me behind the statue and I have no choice but to field his questions. My smile grows increasingly waxen when the questions grow into a droll attempt at conversation.
“My Prince, you have quite an impressive… hawk.” Until Vercingtorix makes his second grand entry, that is.
“Excuse me.” I bow once, tersely, before brushing past the harrowed man. My shock is worn more subtly than his, yet my jaw aches as I clench down a snicker. It is infinitely more funny because I am now warming to the idea that I am drunk, or at least halfway there. There is something else to my brother's drink, too. A trap laid at the edge, for me to fall blithely into.
Vercingtorix's breath blows lightly against my ear, before he draws away. Sly fox. “I regret very little, Vercingtorix, and certainly not you,” I drawl to his looming shadow. I do not yet turn to face him. I wait patiently until the man in red has sulked his way out of the room, leaving the hall near empty, save for a couple meandering through the displays fanned out at the far end.
“Though—this hawk of mine. Did he bite?”
Too many white lies and white lines
Super rich kids with nothing but loose ends
Super rich kids with nothing but fake friends
e is shy, or courtly proper. I’m not sure which. Perhaps it is that he has been raised a prince, and I to one day be a general—his eyes are glancing blows, butterfly brushes. Mine are unabashed; devouring. He should not have asked me here if he did not want my eyes to take in all that he is, all that he could be, as if one wholesome meal. I smile as he disengages, quite politely, from the other holding his attention. I can tell he is disinterested—I can tell it is an act to keep his eyes from my flesh, and this delights me.
I regret very little, Vercingtorix, and certainly not you. As way of answer, I offer one of the two drinks. He feigns, I think, polite indifference—or at least composure—before turning to face me.
We are almost alone. This faux privacy is dangerous; the faux privacy seems, in and of itself, a type of seal as surely as a handshake, or a promise. There is a sort of intimacy to it—I, Vercingtorix, foreigner, soldier, have the eldest son of the Ieshans of myself.
(I like to think it is because of something unique in me; that I, perhaps, am special. The larger, looming thought is that I am one of many, that there is nothing intimate about this).
Nevertheless, I smile. “I think we’ll have to wait and see.”
There is a moment, however, when the brazen innuendo breaks. When the flirtation, bold and ingenuine, flits away to expose something more honest. I cannot help but remember how, during our last encounter, he had broken—he had said, I am growing tired. Not of your company. Just—tired.
It seems, I think, an extraordinarily cruel thing to make him attend to these visitors, play host, observe a hall. I walk so as to force him to face me fully; and for a moment, I am not the man war and betrayal changed. For a moment—
“Adonai, the night is young—but… if it is too much.” I shrug one shoulders growing, already, uncomfortable with the earnestness. “Well, I know of quieter ways to spend the evening.”
He can take it how he wishes; a further flirtation, or what I mean it as. An escape, shared between two boys who might find a party less enjoyable than one another’s company.
I break the tension with a laugh. “By the way, is that guy really your brother? With the snakes for hair? “ More conspiratorially, I add: “They can’t be real.”
And I remember:
Cursed princes, and cursed towers. Martyrdom, or revenge? Those are my elements. Not this. Not the smile on my face, the emptiness blossoming in my chest to remind me you will never be full again.
§
True it never was, Yet because they loved, it was a pure creature.
They left it room enough. And in that space, clear and un-peopled,
it raised its head lightly and scarcely needed being.
They didn’t nourish it with food, but only with the possibility of being.
And that gave the creature so much power.
hen Vercingtorix parts through the lingering crowd to reach me, I envy the ease with which he does it.
It is more than the step. It is more than the motion. It is the surety, the regal-browed charisma, that, despite my birth or even my looks, has never once had the decency to come easily to me.
In my childhood, my tutors had believed that this deficit of character I seemed born with—Keturah was miraculous, but she was not divine—could be trained back into place. That through enough practice, my character would miraculously grow armour around itself, my smile transforming into the pinnacle of diplomacy, my speeches rending entire rooms of men to their knees.
Music would no longer be the only thing I seemed to be gifted in. At the very least, I had an almost puppy-like eagerness to please; that, they had thought, would certainly carry me half of the way.
Of course—I never made it through the other half.
But if I had?
I think about this to avoid thinking about other things—like how we are suddenly alone, like how Pilate's drink sears through my stomach and throat, like how the blood I have coughed into my father's cloak might as well announce to him its presence when he is this close to me—and rock back onto my heels, smiling, my feint of placidity continued without remorse nor mercy.
Surely, he cannot be here simply for me. Surely, he is here because it is strategic. I must anaesthetise myself to every possible disappointment, in this way, before it can sting me numb like a scorpion; and doing so brings me immediate, sabotaging relief. This is familiar; I have done this time, and time, and time again.
“Ah. Patience." Grinning, I reach towards the spare drink he has brought with him. It is a frothy bright champagne, and it is not my brother's concoction. I vaguely recount Pilate disliking champagne; before the deaths of our parents, between twice-weekly declarations of war, I had drank with him many times. He has always had an exorbitant love for wine. “I used to be rather good at that."
I bring the glass to my lips and drink. I am reeling from the effects of the green cocktail yet I am practiced enough, by now, in the art of masking nausea that the champagne goes down easily, and I balance the half-emptied glass on the marble ledge jutting out from the hooves of the lackluster cast. “No longer though, I'm afraid."
My words are half-warning and half-jest. It is good-humor tinged with paranoia.
Vercingtorix is a stranger. I have told myself this for the past twenty-three days, and even this fact—that I know the exact number of days, when before I had been careless enough to miss birthdays until the buttery smell of cakes rose from the kitchens to perfume my curtains—despairs me. It is the thorn in my side I cannot reach. It is the snake in my bed I cannot find. It horrifies me and blows a mocking breath of life into me in cyclical, tormenting echoes.
I try to forget him. I remember him because I am trying to forget him.
I am taken aback when he turns himself to fully facing me. I am leaning against the statue, rearing hooves pressed into the hollows of my spine, my head thumping and my pulse erratic; the hall is deserted and the living statues have wandered down other solemn corners. I hadn't noticed it before, but when we are this close he easily towers over me.
There is nothing in front of me now but eyes as changeable as the sea, and a scar rending them through like a pink river. I wish to touch it, to see if it is as jagged and mangled as it boasts.
I do not.
“Is this concern I am sensing, Vercingtorix?" I say, before breaking into a breathy laugh. The lyre strapped to my back trembles out a singing note. There is a faux giddiness in me now, brought about by the alcohol and my cartwheeling head and the discomfort that rends across his proud mouth, a twist there and gone. This pleases me.
I have become one of those horrible princes more endeared by a show of weakness, than any form of strength.
“Just besides this hall is the armory. As well-equipped as the King's keep, if you'll allow me the boast—and more, I hope—" I pause, my eyes flicking to the scar crowning his shoulder, “—to your liking." In truth I have not stepped foot inside the armory since I found myself barely able to lift a plate, but I have chosen the armory because I am almost certain he will be impressed by it.
And I have always borne an asphyxiating need to please.
I have pushed off of the statue, my breath gushing out in a huff, when my smile flickers like a candle flame. “...is that guy really your brother?" I look up in surprise, and find myself nearly pressed to his shoulder. I ease a step backwards, my wings rustling up against a marble head.
“So you've seen him?" I ask carefully, and I am frustrated at once at how I am suddenly apprehensive. At this point, it has become second-nature. The hatred that swells in me is enough to drown armadas.
But Torix does not know this, so I manage a laugh for him. It comes out stiff and forced. “He is striking, is he not," I mutter, sweeping a curl of hair out of my eyes casually with a wing, before gesturing for him to follow me as I begin to pick my way towards the armory.
“Pilate is the third eldest, and the second son after me. He is now head of house. And I have been bitten by those snakes more times than I can count as a child so I assure you—" I turn back towards him and allow the faintest sneer to curl across my lips, “—they are real, and as the rumors say, venomous."
If there is any accusation in my words, my sneer fades too quickly to confirm it. Instead, I shake my head and cough mildly into my wing. Schemes and betrayals and arsenic in a wineglass are things of the past. The consolation is that I am still alive, after each one.
I am still alive; that must count for something.
He, who navigated with success
the dangerous river of his own birth
once more set forth
on a voyage of discovery
into the land I floated on
but could not touch to claim.
you think you are possessing me but I've got my teeth in you.
I
see everything.
I don’t know everything—as good a job I do convincing everyone otherwise. But I do see everything. It’s my party, after all, and if anything goes wrong I’ll be holding myself responsible for it. Any embarrassment will follow me into my nightmares; there is nothing I hate more than being made a fool of.
But so far things are going swimmingly. (I tap my glass against the nearest piece of wood, part of the doorjamb, as I think this, a stupid commoner’s habit I haven’t quite shed from childhood.) So I’m in a good mood when I see him enter—my brother, our holy eminence Prince Adonai, who has had the absolute nerve to dress himself tonight in our father's fur cloak.
The only thing that soothes me is seeing him up close. From a few feet away, I can make out the dark circles under his eyes; I can see that he is a dull gold now, duller even than the green of my scales, his body rotted from the inside with—with whatever disease it is that he has. The sight of that makes me smile, just a little. To anyone else, I would only look polite. Filled with brotherly love.
I watch him inhale my last cocktail. It is a drink layered with silver and emerald green, whose lemon-sharp taste will make him cough, I know, as soon as it goes all the way down.
I smile when he leaves.
OOC: drink #5 has been made with just a little bit of Solterran magic, and will give Adonai an intermittent, full-body glow throughout the night. it's up to you, Ralli, to decide what color the lights are, how intense it is, or if it comes with any nasty side effects.if you have any questions or concerns, let me know; otherwise, have fun <3
f only he were to confess his envy. If only I were to be made aware, so that I might say, no, Adonai, it is I who envies you. My bravado is nothing in comparison to the chaste, Grecian softness with which he carries himself. I envy his softness; the fur cloak he wears about his supple, thin shoulders, and the regality he possesses even in sickness. I feel at once as if I am looking at a white dove with a broken wing, and a lion stripped of his regalia, made slighter by circumstance or environment. It does not change what the lion is, however; only the context of his living.
But I am not poetic enough to confess these thoughts aloud; I can only curb the earnest intensity of my gaze with clever commentary, and pretend I am not at once overwhelmed by my desire to want him and simultaneously put him out of his misery.
“I can be a little impatient myself,” I admit, with a laugh that is meant to be non committal.
Somehow, it comes out breathless. I think it is because of the lyre, and how it endears him to me more than any words could. Is this concern I am sensing, Vercingtorix?
I shrug, genuinely noncommittal now.
I know if I speak I will betray just how much I enjoy hearing my full name on his mouth, lilted up by his strange Solterra accent.
And while I am not surprised when he invites me to their armory, I am not pleased. I have recognised his eyes having lingered upon the scars at my face and shoulder. My soldiering--my heritage--is evident in all that I am and will ever be, written there with as much detail as continents (and their respective details) upon an atlas. I could tell him the tale of each scar, if he asked. How the most garish--the one crossing my eye--had not been from a battle at all, or any noble venture. Only my father’s temper. And the mark at my shoulder? It had been near death, prevented only by Bondike at the last moment--
The name sours me. The scars sour me. The idea of an armory sours me to the point that I nearly ask, instead:
Play me the lyre, Adonai. It is such a beautiful night. Do not ruin it with war.
Do not force me to show who I really am.
I want to beg him, I want to plead our act continue in the garden of statues. But we are already moving; and I cannot deny him the luxury of his boasts. “I am sure,” I say, without pause, without a perceivable hint I am displeased. “It is all to my liking.”
How soft, I wonder, are those feathers Adonai? Or the fur of your cloak? What cologne do you wear, if I were to slip just ever so close? I might have been left wondering, had the prince not moved so suddenly to escort me; his feathers brush my shoulder just so, and the soft-sweet-rich smell of his skin wafts with them. I smile. So you’ve seen him.
His sudden change in demeanour takes me aback. He is striking, is he not?
I am listening for it, I suppose; and perhaps that is why the rawness is so evident to me, the insecurity that poisons Adonai from within. Brothers competing with brothers; comparing, always, one to the other. I do not smile.
I regret having commented on the fact; instead, I wish I had only asked him to play the lyre.
Please, I think.
Is it too late, to simply play the lyre?
I choose my words carefully.
“No,” and perhaps my tone is less guarded than it should be. Perhaps there is a flash of anger, there, at the way I have witnessed Adonai grow smaller at mere mention of the brother. “He is striking insofar as a serpent is.” There is a dryness to my tone, a lack of appreciation, and I am almost relieved when Adonai begins to lead me toward the armoury. It is much quieter past the guests; and while I had not felt precisely watched before, the armoury is silent and rich with familiar scents.
Grease.
Leather.
Steel.
Wood.
(Missing, of course, the sweat and blood and odour of men in war).
It is silent. I know I should speak. There is a quiet voice within me that demands, Tell him what you see.
And what do I see? I am quiet in the face of his remark; my eyes are cool, interested, but unemotional. I am looking at a fallen prince; I am looking at golden feathers, and a lyre, and a man possessing more courage in the face of suffering than most soldier’s I had ever met. Than myself, when bedridden and broken. I had wanted to die; and the memory seems so fleeting, so bird-like and far away, I scarcely remember the desolation I had felt. It hadn’t seemed like myself.
He does not belong to this backdrop of weaponry, of war maces and swords and bows. He does not belong here; and I do.
I ask, and hate the way my voice sounds like a boys: “Adonai?” Quiet. Quiet. I close the door behind us, and the armoury is dim, lit with a single lantern only. The fire glances off of polished steel; it glances off of me in much the same way. I feel like glass. I feel like breaking, and I do not know why. “Will you play for me?”
§
The things I brought back with me
seem strange and out of place.
In their own land they moved like animals
but here they hold their breath in shame.
he weight of the lyre at my shoulders stills me as I am assaulted by the smell of rich leather, new steel, arena sand. I suck in a breath and it rattles. My guest is somewhere behind me and I am at once eager to see his expression and terrified to let him see mine.
I am attempting to sell him a lie. I am attempting to show him that before I was this dying husk of a prince, I had shot an arrow into the eye of a teryr. I had beaten Miriam into the sand during a match, and heard the bone of her shoulder crack beneath my blade. I had warred against my brother. I had not shied away from violence, but embraced it; I disliked it out of principle but that did not mean I was incapable of it, did not mean that I was weak.
Such is the arrogance of one who has never seen real battle. Such is the foolishness of one who has never seen any death in action except for his own.
I am sure, Torix had said to me back in the hall, it is all to my liking. I had smiled; alcohol had kept it from becoming a beam. Even mention of Pilate had not truly dimmed my mood, once I had gotten over the initial distaste, because Pilate's lauded beauty hadn't captured Vercingtorix's appreciation as I'd feared, and—even if it was a lie—his shoulder had pressed warm and sure against mine in the narrow walkway taking us down to the armoury.
I cannot ask anything more of him.
And yet. When his silence lasts for a breath too long in the face of swords and axes and maces, objects I'd thought would endear him to me, objects critical to this lie I am trying to sell him—dread begins to drag talons down my chest. I have made a mistake. Somehow, I have offended him.
“Adonai." I barely recognise my name spoken from his lips. Stiffly I pivot towards him, my stance near militant. He has eased the door shut behind him and I cannot decipher the softness holding together his words. “Will you play for me?"
I am so taken aback by this that my eyes widen in the way they did before I had entombed myself in a skin of marble. In a way, it had been my first death.
“The lyre?" My voice wavers between uncertainty and astonishment. I have not played for an audience since boyhood; I would never think he was of the type to enjoy such frivolities. Yet before I truly know what I am doing, I nod, and the lyre has been eased off from its the strap around my shoulder and held gently, like a child, against my chest. My cape is discarded in this struggle, and splays over the seat of a lone stool.
I glance towards him, mystified, before easing myself down to the scarred wooden floor. As I do, I struggle to fill up the silence; his request has sprung out from the underbrush and caught me unawares. And when I am unaware—I am sickeningly prone to meekness. “You didn't—strike me as the type, really," I say, lightly.
I bite my tongue to avoid picking at the strings as I wait for him to settle besides me.
I hum out the first notes of a song, and when I have my melody, I play.
When I was young, I was never seen without a gold-tipped lyre strapped like a quiver around my shoulders. I would strum it as I went to and from lessons, accompanied always by its sweet melody and smooth wood grain, testing out chords and keys I would arrange into songs inked between sheets of stained parchment.
If there was no lyre at my side, I was not Adonai. I was not the prince of soft smiles and softer dissents. To me, it was as much of a companion as a hound is to other boys, and a lyre is far less troublesome than a hound to keep. That, I suspect, was the sole reason why I had been allowed to nurse this habit late into adolescence. My tutors were rarely sentimental and hardly inclined to allow boys to grow into soft-spined cowards. Their reputations were staked on me.
I was allowed my lyre because if they did not allow me something, they feared that I would break before I was ever close to grown.
I finish one song and bleed its ending chords into the opening of another. I am not sure how long I play before I say, my voice breaking roughly through a melancholic refrain, “It seems like—you know many things about me, while I know near nothing of you.” Is it nostalgia or is it drink or is it him—Vercingtorix with the eyes of the sea—that has caused this thundering ache in my chest?
I know nothing about him. I know enough to know that I want to know everything about him. This is torment. This is exhilarating. A curl of my hair has fallen into my eyes and I push it away; I wish to see all of him. Under the light of a single torch, his skin gleams like the steel of a blade. I do not notice how I, myself, have begun to glow a faint, undulating aurum.
There is only my song and Vercingtorix, Vercingtorix.
Before me his scars are gulleys, marks of old violence, and I wish to know the cause of every one so that I may play his words over and over and over in my head when he is gone. I forget that I am sick. I forget that I am dying. I lean towards him, my eyes shadowed, the strings of my lyre trembling in sorrow, until I see myself reflected in the pools of his gaze and recoil, as if burned.
I am sick. I am dying. And I have never wished to mourn for myself until I have discovered that I am broken.
When I speak again, it is a thin, thin chord. “Was I wrong, to bring you here?” My lyre sinks down to the floor.
My wing reaches for the scar slashing through his sea-green eye.
I'm forever chasing after time
But everybody dies, dies
If I could buy forever at a price
I would buy it twice, twice
But if the earth ends in fire
And the seas are frozen in time
There'll be just one survivor
The memory that I was yours
ur aloneness is intoxicating in a way that surprises me; it is intoxicating in a way that I have not known for months, or even years. With the door shut behind me, I cannot take my eyes from him; I cannot help but let them rove, leisurely, every inch of his frame and then linger at his face. The shadows and flickering firelight accent his handsome cheekbones; they transform him into a man marblesque, where the shadows under his eyes have become intentional and the blood coughed into his fur cloak a mere suggestion of darkness.
Adonai is incredibly striking, I think. The word falls readily to the tip of my tongue. He is gold, gold, gold and gold again. But all of that is made more remarkable by his softness; by his articulate tongue; by the ringlet of pale yellow hair that falls at his brow, and makes him coy, unreachable. In an unexpected way, the armoury accentuates him more than the marble statues had; his difference there, his inherent disbelonging, endears him to me more than if he were donned in armour and prepared for war.
I have tasted a lifetime of those men. I have sold my soul for them, again and again and again. I have nothing left for swords and battle maces, for those who love only the drumbeat of conflict, the elated adrenaline of camaraderie. They have left their marks on me, I think, and it is a stark relief when Adonai stands before a backdrop of violence and unmaking as a visitor. He does not need to show me how brave he can be, I think; he already fights a beast I could never overcome, with more tact than I could ever muster.
I like, then, that I surprise him with my request. It takes him aback. His eyes widen and I laugh cordially; it is my first real laugh of the night, high and bright and unfamiliar in my mouth. “Yes, the lyre.” I will always enjoy being what people least expect; and when he obliges me, something swells strangely in my breast. It is fragile, and already dying--a fledgling bird abandoned. Yet that feeling is hope.
The cloak slips to expose one angular shoulder, and then the other. His hair is disheveled where the fur had ruffled it. He holds the lyre against his chest and looks again to me, as if confirming this is what I want--that I am not joking. I only nod and then he begins to play.
In the dark, in the torches, the music sounds ethereal. He does not belong here, no, and by here I mean on this earth. I cannot help but draw nearer, the music a force of gravity. His voice is the undercurrent that holds the strings together, a keening hum that sets my heart to aching.
Music, in Oresziah, was reserved for funeral processions. It was reserved for tragedies. It makes me think of bonfires and burning bodies; of all the friends I had laid to rest. But this is different; moving, and alive, like a pulse under-thumb. Time stretches untouchably away from us; it could have been hours or minutes that I stand there transfixed, watching the gentle movements of his throat, his eyes, his face. His lids dance with the effort of his playing; the pulse beats at the soft juncture of his neck, and there, I think, I would like to touch. Perhaps he is drawing to a close; but when I think so, the song carries on. I cannot help but close the distance between us. I set my chin against his shoulder, just before the joint of his wing, and with unexpected gentleness stroke the soft down at the base of his wings with one brush of my nose.
It seems like you know many things about me, while I know near nothing of you.
That, too, becomes the song. The mourning lyre, which reminds me of ash, of funeral pyres.
It is the question--or acknowledgement, anyway--that I fear the most. I laugh with what I hope is false bravado; but even I recognise the sudden quake in the gesture. I should offer something of myself, some truth that is not unbearable. But when I go to speak, I have nothing to say. This is me, and I am not--
I do not belong here, either. I do not belong besides this prince who is unlike any I have ever known before, who plays the lyre for me between racks of gleaming swords. At last, into the quiet that grows when Adonai sets down the lyre: “What would you like to know?” I am breathless, and afraid, of what he may ask.
Was I wrong, to bring you here? The setting of the lyre sounds tremendous; the wood against the stone floor echoes in a way that Adonai’s voice does not; like a seal; like a promise. His wing reaches out; those feathers which I have admired brush ever-so-softly against the deep scar that marks my eye. I close them against the sensation, the softer-than-soft, the gentleness, the warmth. “No,” I whisper, to the dark behind my lids. There are many memories I could paint there, if I wanted; but in this instance, I do not. I press forward into the touch, eyes still closed; still vulnerable.
He was not wrong to bring me here.
It shows him everything I am; everything I have ever been. I am defined by halls like these. I am given life, voice, and fire by halls like these. I do not belong anywhere else. The lyre is within me. The lyre is singing, resonant, to my soul. I know this is unavoidable; I know, in part, he invited me here to discuss his brother, to discuss the cursed prince in the cursed tower. Where else would one venture down such avenues of thought, if not in an armoury?
But strangely, he does not make it feel like any armoury I have ever known before.
“No,” I repeat, a little more strongly. I open my eyes to see him radiating faint light. “It is the only place I’d like to be.” A smile flits briefly across my mouth. “And I am very impressed with what I see.” The implication is clear. My eyes have gone nowhere except for him; and we are there, together, alone. “It makes me appreciate you more,” I add, abruptly. It is atypically vulnerable. “I am accustomed to war rooms and generals and men who--” My voice sounds strange, even to myself. “And men who… are just like me.”
I worry he will take offense; but it is the largest compliment I can bestow. “Where,” I ask, so as to not dwell on my own uncertainty. “If I could… if I were to… take you somewhere, where would you like to go?” It occurs to me he must not often leave Solterra, or even his family estate. Inexplicably, I wish I could take him to the sea.
This, I would say. This is all that I am.
I know this quiet interlude cannot last. Already, the last struck string of the lyre has faded into infinity. It is only his breathing, and mine, and the way he ignites a hunger in me to both save and destroy.
§
i would take the spear and return the lyre,
hear you sing memories of two boys skipping stones
across the sea, of the sweet crunch of figs between our grinning teeth
of your faltering breath, kissing the shadows of my face
but i can only stare at your golden back
as you march off to war
There is something different to this laugh of his. I marvel at the way his eyes crinkle at the corners, like autumn leaves. He looks younger. I feel as if I am looking, suddenly, at a painting of him, either fantasy or a past reality: a proud, tall youth, militant still in his posture, yet his step unburdened of a limp, his skin unmarred by scars.
I barely recognise him like this, but I tell myself that this is forgivable. I wish, instead, to pluck this painting out and carry it away with me. I wish this fiercely. I search for permanence in everything now, and it has yet to make me weary.
“Alright," I say, and my laugh is an echo of his.
As I play, I look occasionally towards him to glean from him his feelings. My eyes flit again and again, glancing touches, over his angular brow and his arrow-straight nose and his eyes as changeable as the sea.
It is the mark of the true musician to honour the audience always. I am playing not for myself but for him. There is no pleasure to be had if the listener is not enraptured; and if he is, then there is no greater pleasure. I wish to see how the melody captures him. I wish to see if the rhythm is too slow; if his attention flags; if the song is distastefully spritely. I wish to catch my errors before they can happen. I wish—
I wish to be godly perfect.
Mernatius' father had been a merciless teacher, but he had said to me, once, that I was a merciless student. Nothing was ever enough for me. I was rarely happy, he'd said, because I was happiest when I was in torment. This had stung. My smile had collapsed into a snarl. In any case, I'd retorted, it is better than being a fool in happiness. I no longer remember who I was angry at. Only that I had remained silent for the rest of the lesson, my eyes as cold and sullen as dull steel.
So when Vercingtorix draws closer, and closer, and closer as I play; when he tucks his warm chin against my cold shoulder; when his hair spills pale over my chest; when his nose brushes the shuddering feathers along my back—I wonder what the younger version of me would say to such a scene. A soft-lidded youth penitent in his dedication to unhappiness. Only a fool is happy, he would murmur. The eyes of my younger self, when he lays them onto me, are mercury and starlight and envy.
The line of my throat is golden and as soft as fawn skin in the sputtering torchlight. My inhale is drowned by lyre-song. My attention to the strings flag; my rhythm becomes as uneven as my breath. This is unfair; Vercingtorix means to distract me and I cannot return anything but a heavy-lidded shudder. I must tend to the strings and him, at once. They are both jealous things after my attention.
Vexed, I turn my head and press into his bronze neck, inhaling the scent of him—wood-smell and sea-salt—and only turning away when my next chord comes and I have forgotten it.
“What would you like to know?" His laugh echoes through the room once again, yet this time it is a hollow sound. It is jarring against my music until I realise that I have set my lyre down, and the music is only a memory.
I shift towards him now, freed, and begin to thread my touch softly through his pale, pale hair. It is almost the color of mine. “Does my question frighten you?" My voice is light and laughing. I tug at his hair; payback. I am being extraordinarily kind. He deserves worse punishment.
Yet I think it over solemnly, because I wish to know everything yet cannot say this. So I begin with: “You never told me what you do. Or, did, I suppose." He is a foreigner not just to this court but to this land. He has the scars and limp of a soldier, barely returned; yet the charisma and—devilry—of an heir born into title. I know the type, the noble type, almost too well; yet Vercingtorix fits it only in some corners, the rest of him spilling over into a shape that mystifies me.
In comparison, I do not think that I am difficult to know. I am a prince. My horn is as golden as a crown. I have never touched war. My skin is smooth and wan. My mouth is bloody if you open it. My eyes are glossy and blown-wide, like the dark heart of a poppy.
I shift, my back pressing into the cold stone wall we are leaned up against, when he says to me that I was not wrong. My wing lingers on the scar over his eye and it is as rough and harsh as I had suspected.
No—it is more. It is gruesome and cut as deep as a canyon yet I am fascinated. The question hangs in the air between us—who did this to you?—yet I am afraid to ask it. His scars mock to me that I am pretending to believe that I might understand, because he is not a noble nor common and I know very little of anything else.
“No," he says. “It is the only place I'd like to be." I watch him carefully. “And I am very impressed with what I see." My mouth curves into a smile. I know what he has given me. I know what I am supposed to do with it. Pilate's affairs are the infamy of our house but since he and I had stood at a height ever since adolescence, I had resolved not to trail him in anything; and though that game in particular had been his strength and my weakness, suffice to say I had given it my best effort.
I idealise myself in my memories. I was so far from perfect that it pained me, and sometimes—I did shameful things. None but my snake-maned brother knows of them. As carefully as I had watched him, as carefully as he had watched me.
My lashes thread together when I angle my chin down and look at him through them. “It makes me appreciate you more." My golden horn taps softly against his black ones. “Sly," I murmur, though I do not look up at him as I say it. I am looking at his mouth, at the dark lips, at the way he forms his syllables. “And men who... are just like me" My pulse is thick and slow in my ear. It is only then that I realise I am warm, warm, warm and that my wings, draped over my back, are pulsing with golden light.
I wonder what I look like to him. Less like death, and more like something eternal? I hope so. “I am not," I say, finally, my voice barely a whisper, “like them." I realise, then, that that is why he has come to this party, followed me to this armoury, rested his head against my shoulder. Because I am a marvel; because he has never known anything like me.
This should bother me. I smile. It doesn't. When the inside of you rots away as you deliberate, it helps put things into dear perspective. Am I not doing the same to him? Am I not as fascinated by him for the very same reasons? Because he is different. Because I have never known anything like him.
Because I am running out of time to find out.
So I do not hesitate when I bring my mouth close to his. “Shall I tell you your words back to you? Or shall I just—" My lips against his nose, his cheek, his eye, are grinning. “—show you." My lungs are clean of blood. My eyes are free of poppies. I draw away, but I drape my wing over his back and leave it there. The cold of the wall along my spine sobers me. My head tilts towards the vaulted ceiling, my eyes fluttering softly closed. “I have never been across the seas but I know that I don't need to. I know I will not find anyone quite like you."
My voice is free and open. I mean what I say. I have very little time left to waste it away on lies. When he asks me where I would wish to go if he could—if he was—to take me there, my pulse quickens. Without hesitation, I reply, “The sea. I have never been to see it, as a desert prince. Yet I know it is the color of your eyes."
I crack open my own, and they are less ink and more sky. Bright, like my grin. With almost my old speed, I push myself off the wall and towards him again, pressing my nose to his. “I wish to confirm this."
My wings hover in a glowing shield above him, so that he will see only me.
How does the moon look tonight
From the other side of town
God, I wish I knew
Is it bold? Is it bright?
Is it hanging in the sky
Looking down on you?
Oh I wish I was the moon
he lyre and Adonai’s ambient glow break something within me.
I wish to say it is like a great rending of flesh; horrific, terrible. I wish to say the change is an arterial spray against all that I am, and cannot be washed out. That the break is like death, with a permeance, a definence. But it is not so. The break is hardly so final, so finite. Instead, it is the great creaking of rusted metal or groaning of wood swollen by the sea. The break is a mast falling upon a ship in a storm; a cathedral upon a cliff’s precipice that tumbles down and down again, cracking into the sea. A break that can be eaten up by time; a break that ivy might cover, or fish may inhabit. The thing that breaks sinks; it settles in the depths of me to rot. The breaking is what defines it; the breaking is what changes it from normalcy to tragedy. A ship to a reef. A cathedral to the empty haunting of dead beliefs.
I blame the ephemerality of this moment: it is the way Adonai becomes the center of my breath, my being, and my mind remains fixated upon each flutter of his lashes, each flexed inhalation at his side. This close, I discern he smells of parchment and clean sheets and, faintly, of blood. The last essence is the most familiar; the last essence is a reminder that every lyre sings for a funeral, not a love affair.
Strangely, I do not mind. Strangely, the break is almost a relief; the knowledge, sudden and terrible, that we are both doomed in our own ways. Please, I think. Let us not break each other.
Does my question frighten you? This undulation between coy and bold, between soft and savage. My smile is held like an ember in my mouth; burning; slow. As he tugs at my hair, I am endeared to him more than I will ever have the courage to admit. It hurts sweetly, delicately, and I find joy in the reminder I feel as any man does.
I know I should lie but somehow, in firelight and song, I cannot. “Yes,” my voice emerges breathless and raw.
Yes, the question frightens me.
Because, like the armoury, it demands I expose aspects of myself I wish were dead and buried. It means acknowledging the depth of my tortured eyes and the reasons for my weaponized smiles.
The question he asks is the most simple, I suppose. It betrays an aspect of society that I will never be able to forgive: men become what they do, and are defined by it.
“I was a soldier,” I say, simply. “But you already knew that.”
I can tell from his eyes the answer is not enough. I can tell from his ravenous expression he wants more of me and already a desperation sets in. I have little of myself to give. Yet, I find a way to add, carefully:
“Everyone, where I am from, was a soldier. We fought a generational, racial war. I was the last generation, before we won.” I laugh; it is not exactly mirthless, no, nor is it empty. I do not have words for the feeling that washes over me, next. “It was what we were raised for; but what do men, raised for war, become when the war is over?” In this I confess that I no longer know what I do, if he were to ask that.
It is the great injustice of my life, I think.
It is why I am gnarled like roots grown around a rock.
Those soft feathers, against my hard scar. The hunger is there in the star-bright expression of his eyes: I see myself reflected in his wide pupils, small and dark, and the light that washes over his face makes him seem both young and old at once. There is something about him that inspires confession: perhaps it is the docility of his sickness, the frankness of our first meeting when he said, a cursed prince lives in that tower.
“My father,” I tell him, of the scar. The truth is a betrayal to the one person I have ever loved, and the only person who ever knew the reality of the mark. “I spoke out of turn and he punished me as he saw fit.” The bitterness is gone, I am surprised. I only state a fact.
I cannot help the way I look at him, now: longingly. The one touch had not been enough, and left me hungry. But I do not trust myself to touch him as he touches me; I feel monstrous, being unable to remember not hurting what I have touched before. My mind fills of stolen memories: of chaste kisses turned ravenous, of burning beneath flesh like the body at the center of the pyre, boys who beckoned me with their eyes and promised love with their tongues, all turned to ash. Will I burn you, Adonai? If I touch you, will you break?
He takes the choice from me. Our horns clash, the gentlest of wars. Beyond the crest of his mane and the silhouette of his glowing wings, swords and axes and spears grin wickedly.
I am not like them. He agrees.
He is brave where I am not. His mouth nearly brushes mine; and his words are lost to the flames he ignites with the soft brush of his skin against mine, at my nose, my eyelids, my cheeks. He knows he is being cruel; when he draws away, I groan, a sound low in my throat and earnestly raw.
In that moment, he is more clear than I have ever seen him. It takes me the clarity to recognise that in the past there has been a sheen of something other, of clouds flitting over the sun. I am taken aback, nearly: but he presses on, bold as a lion. He compliments me and says the one thing I feared he would.
“I could show it to you,” I say, softly.
I know he will not believe me. I know he will fear being a hindrance; but the longing in his voice was enough to ignite a vicious want within me, a desire to create this fantasy. Before I can blink, we are nose-to-nose; the objects of war in the background disappear as he unfurls his wings.
It is only this:
Feathers, and light, and eyes that are Persian blue. They are the only blue I have ever seen that have not reminded me of the sea. They are almost overwhelming; but for once, there is nothing else. There is no fury burning just beneath the surface; no need for vengeance, no need--
(But, I think, this is exactly what I have always sought out. A way to escape myself, a way to let everything else fade--)
I try to convince myself this is different, by saying: “I have a dragon. We could fly there in less than a day, if you would like. I will show you the sea.”
How can I tell you that it is not beautiful, Adonai?
How can I tell you the sea is full of wretched things, of terrors unimagined?
Yet, I cannot bring myself to share my own hatred; I cannot let the bitterness colour the light of your wings, or darken the hope of your expression. So I do not. I do not. I remember the sea from a cliffside, staring down, blue and as tortured as I. “Let me take you.” There is a pleading quality of my tone, now; one that does not suit me, I think. But I press closer now, if that were possible; I raise my chin to tuck him into the alcove beneath me, and bury my face into the bliss of his wings.
(Just pretending, just believing, there is nothing beyond this).
Breathing, and knowing, it already flits from my grasp. Because one day, I am certain, he will wonder at more than the scars. He will see me not as a fascinating marvel separate from his life of princely duties, but as all the synonyms of soldier:
"Do you regret it?" she asks me. I stand at the end of the corridor of her prison, looking down the rows toward her.
She will die tomorrow.
I don't answer. I hate that silence more than anything else I have ever done in my life.
I could not say that the love I had felt had turned to hatred; and that hatred was furious, and inescapable, and would burn us both. It was better this way, I had thought. It was better if--
I open my eyes and, even seeing nothing but gold, the swords never disappear.
§
i would take the spear and return the lyre,
hear you sing memories of two boys skipping stones
across the sea, of the sweet crunch of figs between our grinning teeth
of your faltering breath, kissing the shadows of my face
but i can only stare at your golden back
as you march off to war
