But the hard prey is the one that won’t come bidden.
Vercingtorix was born a hunter.
It is all he has ever known. He comes to the fires to sell his soul to the practices of Novus; to pay homage to pagan gods he will never worship. His worries are written on a piece of parchment, already prepared to be enflamed. The list seems grossly inadequate, but his mother had always accused him of being a narcissistic like his father. What do you know of worry? she used to tell him, when he grew short with her concern for his wellbeing. Nothing, she would say. You will never be the mother to such an unruly son.
And so the list:
Boudika.
Boudika.
Boudika.
If she is alive, still, in Novus. If she is here at all, of it the sea took her even further. And, anyways, it is simple enough, the fixation of his purpose within the nation. Why not burn it? Why not watch the fire flare up and spark with embers, to watch his concerns burn? Torix had listened to the depth of the ceremony; and he would be a liar if there was not a small part of him hoping for the image of the woman who haunts him to appear within the billowing smoke. She doesn’t.
But someone else does.
Through the fire Vercingtorix drops the name into, he sees a series of images glint metallically upon a small horse’s flank.
At first, he does not move, but dismisses it as one of the strange native’s foreign (to him, at least) intricacies. But then: Torix realises they are familiar and hardly foreign at all.
No.
He remembers the way the flesh seared beneath the metallic paint, and the way the Old Priest muttered the arcane words of the Old Gods.
Binding a Soul always smelled of burnt flesh, piss, the early morning tide, full of death. Salt, and fish, and sand. His lip twitches; it almost becomes a sneer. And then Torix is weaving through the crowd in quiet, measured pursuit.
He has always been a hunter. It is the truth of Vercingtorix that defines him; it is the thing that drives him now to near-madness, as he exists in a world where the creatures he is meant to hunt no longer exist. Yet—here is one, familiar, known and he follows her stride past natives, past bonfires, until she stands on the dark stretch at the end of the gathering, staring out at the sea upon the cliffside.
Torix has watched her now for a portion of the night; and it is now and only now that he approaches. He is no less imposing, despite the limp that jars each step. By the time he reaches her, the sound of the bonfires seems distant; it is a crackling of fire and wood in the background to their meeting, and the crash of the sea.
She does not drop a name into the fire. She thinks of it, only briefly, dismissively; here she is half-drunken and accosting the believers, the idiots, the sheep. There are no gods here. There are only devils, and the sea. And it is not her sea.
So it is not long before she stalks off, or stumbles, and finds herself at the cliff’s edge overlooking their sea (the not-her-sea). The sea she cannot climb into like a shell, like the womb. The sea she cannot become. All she has is its salt, and this, she does not want. It flakes from her like dead skin and colors her like an old nag. In her winter coat, she seems old enough, but the summer marks her lean and black, in earlier times, a predator. Now she is thin, and tired, and her coat is half as thick and curled as it will be. The silver of her tattoos is visible but not important. She will not see him again, she has decided, and no one else will ever care enough to ask.
Saphira does not know he is there until he speaks her name. Every muscle of her body tightens, stiff. She turns, slowly, half-white eye fixing on him. She wants to turn him to salt, and she wants to run.
But the hard prey is the one that won’t come bidden.
Swine.
There are only two emotions in life that matter.
Love, and hate.
All the rest only serve to fill the void of other’s absences.
Friendship is a poor mockery of love. Boredom, or annoyance, a shadow to fill the void that is empty without hate.
Vercingtorix, between the two, has always been more full of hate than love. But it fills him wholly; it cements every empty inch of him until he feels full, complete, a man with all his needs met.
When she curses at him, when she spits at his feet, he only smiles. She looks decrepit, compared to what she had been in her prime; fury and sea and eyes bright with wrath. She, he knows, must be full of hate too. But now the vessel her hate fills is thin and cursed; a mockery of what she had been.
“Now, Saphira,” Vercingtorix murmurs. “That’s no way to speak to someone who granted you a favour, once.”
Vercingtorix pauses. There is something wicked in his eyes; something that belongs to firelight, to flesh wrested open by eager teeth, the jagged cut of lightening in the storming sky. “After all, I let you live.”
For a moment—so transient it is more like a breath than a thought—Vercingtorix feels like a lieutenant again, his words his weapons, his strength in his command.
“This is not living,” Saphira hisses. She is a shell, and not even a sea-shell, she is an old cicada-skin forgotten on a branch. She is nothing. She is not a whale, or a shark, or a seagull, or the sea. She is a stone, bound to the shoreline. Forever.
But, she thinks: he is here. He is here, without his army. Briefly panic asks - unless he is? As her eyes graze his form she thinks, no. No. He is alone. Lost; he thinks to carry on tormenting me but, there are no swords charging with him. Her mouth twists into a cruel grin and she says, “But you are hardly living, yourself.” She hopes it hurts him, and she hopes it is true. She hopes that he is grasping for his old life as desperately as she.
But the hard prey is the one that won’t come bidden.
This is not living.
I want to hate her like I used to, like I did when I drew the arcane marks onto her flesh. I want to hate her like I did when I smelled her flesh burn. But, somehow, I don’t. I only feel the empty pleasure of knowing I had done this, I had exerted the same sort of misery on someone else that forever nests within my own hollow heart.
Then, she says the fucking words.
But you are hardly living, yourself.
She has no right to say them. Whatever smugness I had felt burns away. She draws attention to the most obvious absence. I am alone. A man who had always been flanked by comrades, by brothers in arms, alone.
Somehow, I still manage to sneer. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The lie is on the tip of my tongue, the explanation she hasn’t asked for:
They sent me here to scout for new conquests.
They sent me here to find new shores to conquer.
My mouth is dry when I recognize that she is the only thing left, truly, of the life I used to live. I should hate her for that, at least.
