this is who we were, before bones, before dirt, before even light. this untameable expanse. this blue mirror-of-god. this heaving, churning proof that we have always been deep, restless souls.
Ah, that is where you are wrong. My first language is death.
When Vercingtorix hears it, he knows exactly what kind of woman she is. The comment belongs to the bravado of general’s sons and the First Khashran Princes, to narcissists and captains. To leaders who get their people killed. He nearly smiles, yes, but to hear such confidence—such dangerous, dangerous confidence—from a woman nonetheless… It fills him with a type of disgust he has never before experienced. But, as Vercingtorix does with all his feelings, he files it away, compartmentalises it. It only ever flashes across his face as mild intrigue.
Should her comment evoke fear in him? A deep, lasting respect? How awe-inspiring, that you have known death before anguish!
But Torix’s face is smooth; if anything, it can be read as curious.
Damascus’s eyes are alight, however, with amusement. The dark opalescent irises catch the light in a way that could be laughter but is not, is only light and, that light, nearly illusion. “Then the only death you must know,” he says, melodic, a voice of primal drumbeats and chants and rhythmic pulses. “Is the peaceful kind. What a blessed life you must lead.”
Torix’s glances at the dark dragon. He adds, as if disapproving of the outbreak: “I think what Damascus means to imply is that pain comes before the type of death we know.”
Anguish. Pain. Despair.
Without that, what is before death?
Sleep? Peace? Darkness?
No.
Death is being gutted at the beach, or a jugular ripped out by jagged teeth. No one from Oresziah ever dies old.
Torix laughs, almost apologetically. “I apologise for my companion. He can be a little… intense.” Smoothly, Torix switches to a different topic of conversation. “I have not been yet to Denocte. If I visit, what would you recommend doing there?”
we lick saltwater stains from our hands, and yes, they taste like all the shipwrecked songs of our forefathers, but also like every sorrow we used to be afraid of devouring until we understood that this is a place of rebirth too
when the shadows come and cover the horizon i will be the one to slay all the giants
Can Antiope even say that she has felt death before, truly? She’s not certain, for even in that moment when, on the battlefield, that spear was plunged between her ribs and pierced her lung she knew that she would not die.
Perhaps, in a way, a piece of her died in order for the rest of her to continue living; but more simply than that she slept in what looked like death, so that her body could rejuvenate. And then she woke, knowing no pain, having no scar.
“If that is what you wish to believe,” Antiope says, looking curiously into the beast's strange, strange eyes. Eyes that are like nothing she has ever seen before and, she imagines, like nothing she will ever see again.
If her life is anything, it is certainly not blessed.
Her attention is taken by the man again, who seems to elaborate on—or rather correct—the statement that his companion has made. The Denoctian sovereign considers for a moment. “Pain comes before the type of death that I know, too, just not my own.” She remembers the first time she recognized it, in their eyes. She never had before.
When he laughs, her head tilts ever so slightly. Almost imperceptibly. “I do not mind it. I find it… compelling, the thoughts of a creature such as he.” It is not many who can say that they have spoken with a dragon, she assumes. Antiope did not imagine one to be much of a conversationalist.
She wants to tell him not to visit Denocte, when he asks. She wants to tell him nowhere, because as intrigued by his great beast as she is, a part of her is still wary. A part of her is still reminded of the judging eye of the moon in the sky.
“I think you would find the markets to be our most spoken of attraction,” the woman says after a small hesitation, as though thinking. She begins to turn away, toward the coast. Toward her home, her court, her people. “Vendors from all over Novus, from across the world, come to sell their goods,” she says lastly, almost as a parting.
The Night Markets sell everything from the luxe to the macabre, if one knows where to look. Antiope wonders, as she leaves him, if he is one who knows where to look.
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