at the trial of God we will ask: why did you allow this?
and the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?
❖
T
he capitol of Delumine reflects the springtime atmosphere of the surrounding Viride. Everywhere, ivy chokes the brick and mortar; and far below the Rapax is full to bursting. Spring has brought with it heavy rains and the vivaciousness of blooming foliage. The deciduous trees are the too-bright green of new life; pollen drifts on the wind like gold dust; birds flit happily from brick building to brick building, only to settle in a tree.
All of Delumine seems to possess an aura of festivity. Perhaps it is the flower festival of Terrastella, or the fire festival Denocte has brought. Pravda could not say. It is simply a matter of fact that the days are brighter, longer, and he hears more laughter drift in from the streets.
He does not understand this, however. He has always preferred the silence of winter and nearly misses it, now, as he walks down the street of the city. Pravda is heading toward the library—it is strange, in fact, he is not already there. But when he catches a glimpse of the Warden through the trees, he pauses—he has always found the man to be very… un-Delumine, but more and more to an observer it seems as if everything within the Court is very…. un-Delumine.
But, perhaps, that is judgement before knowledge. Pravda walks toward him. “Warden,” he greets, but his deliverance is precise, controlled. “Am I interrupting anything? Or could I invite you to a walk?”
a shard of god
in my mouth
turning
my tongue into
rivers of blood.
W
arden.
It's as familiar to him as his own name. A word anyone could speak from across the room, in a hushed whisper, and it would still ring through him like church bells. When he is called, he vibrates with the sound. Warden. He does not know how to be anything else.
Delumine is sleeping, but not in the haunted, grave-still way that it had through the winter (and the winter before, when-- well, when.) Delumine sleeps like a comfortable thing, bedded down in feather pillows, cheeks pressed into a good night's sleep. It sleeps because it can. It sleeps because it is safe.
The streets are warm with the late-spring sun that bakes his wings to his back, the dark wood of the ships and inns and small houses edged up to path a kind of deep blue where they would always look black as sea-rock or the heart of the woods. As he listens, there are birds, floating free from one broad-leafed maple to the next. He watches them: finches, a dark-faced jay-- they watch him back.
All this: so much peace, so much quiet, a sense of home that they have only just recaptured after the nightmare of the past year.
--But Andras still feels so tired.
Warden, the voice says. He turns to see a man, black on white where he's white on black. For a moment they are strange mirrors of each other. Am I interrupting anything? Or could I invite you to a walk? He doesn't look familiar, but the man calls him Warden and he has learned over time that tourists often don't show him the same kindness. It is not a Warden's job to have a face, unless it is snarling.
Andras almost laughs at him. It's a balloon in his chest. Sheer force of will makes him swallow it before it gets to the back of his tongue. "That's new." he says, in a rare moment of--largely mirthless--levity. "No." No, he doesn't want to. No, he has no good reason to refuse. No, no, no, and yet the world and its people won't leave him alone. "--But I will. Where to?" He shrinks a full inch as his muscles unclench, first from his shoulders and then down his legs and up through his neck.
Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others,
or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope
❖
T
hat’s new. If Pravda were a man prone to expressions, he might arch a brow or smother a sneer. Instead he merely regards Andras with a clear lack of humor, impassive as stone. “A man of duty, I see.” Pravda’s voice, however, curls just a little wryly.
But the tension drains from Delumine’s warden and Pravda turns to begin walking down a cobblestone path. The wide street gives way to thick trees on either side. Pravda does not speak; he remains pensive, examining the Warden only in sly, sidelong glances so brief they might not exist at all.
“Tell me of Delumine, Warden?” The request is phrased politely, in a tone of voice that suggests Pravda truly cares for the other man’s opinion. Perhaps he does. Pravda possesses an impassivity—an apathy—that makes him difficult to read. “What do you love of our court?”
Pravda, during his life in Novus, has never been particularly outspoken. He has primarily watched from afar the goings on of his Court. The loyalty he feels does not well fiercely in his breast; contrarily, he remains attached to Delumine only in essence, in his quest for knowledge, in that he was born there. His silence has behooved him, however, in observing. He has watched Delumine for the past handful of years and he cannot help but begin to wonder.
The streets do not suit the Warden, Pravda notices, who shed his tension as one takes off a jacket in the cold. Unwillingly. Pravda does not smile. He does nothing but walk, admiring the vibrant life and quiet disposition of the streets.
This encounter, as with any other in Pravda’s life, has been carefully anticipated from afar. He would like to understand the Warden; in his mind’s eye, he sees Andras as the closet a man may come to being a keeper of justice in Novus. A job requiring criticism and judgement.
a shard of god
in my mouth
turning
my tongue into
rivers of blood.
H
e is often quiet without being so: tight-lipped and brow stern, thinking little and saying even less. But Andras is a verb given a body, and he is surprisingly loud as he lives day to day. As they walk his magic crackles across the planes of his skin with the keen of an electric guitar. His footsteps are heavy on the road. There is a constant, audible shuffling as he endlessly tucks and untucks wings, laying one on top, then the other, then the other.
The warden's mother would have said he was a fussy child, if she had been so inclined. She would say he knows only two things: how to yell, and how to scream-- and they are not the same thing. Fussy boys become fussy men with heavy brows on their thin faces. Fussy men say "There's nothing wrong with a sense of duty," as he notes, out of the corner of his eye, the way Pravda stares.
Delumine has a way of producing vague things out of thin air. Sometimes it is a bird, or the morning fog. Sometimes it is a man with braided hair who asks, what do you love of our court? as the path melts into a side street lined with lanterns. Their light glances off the sharp curve of his glasses.
He does not quite know what to say-- and even if he did, Andras is less likely to say it than most. "Most of it. I like the library. I like the trees. Why do you want to know?"
Andras has always known he loves Delumine, as an undercurrent to every day, the same electric background hum of his magic. He stands in festival squares because, as small and volatile as he is, to do anything other than protect his home would not be just unthinkable, but impossible. Andras walks through the woods to the city every morning. He sits in the same dark, stuffy tea shop where the girl at the counter smiles at him and calls him by his name. He stares at the trees and tastes blood when it snows and shivers at night because his love for Delumine is all-encompass.
It has just... always been there. He has always thought actions speak louder than words-- and not only because words often elude him.
"I don't like the snow."
Blood-spattered snow on a mountain of mangled flesh. But he doesn't say. He wouldn't. Andras doesn't realize his body has gone tight again until his legs ache with the effort.
