“The forest rose like a dream
from the mind of Chaos’s lonely daughter
and the sun fell heavy and thick
to warm the blood of a world"
The twilight has long since started to settle on the horizon, darker and darker shades of blue and purple bruising the sunlight like a fist. Something about the weight of it settles an itch she didn't realize was creeping down her spine. Like an almost settled thing, bloated on the tonics of the wealthy, she prowls the closing market like a queen walking through a graveyard.
Somewhere the gutter rats, the poor, and the fools are gathering for another night of blood and lust. Somewhere a Davke child is laying blade to throat with hopes to crown himself by a bonfire. Somewhere there are a hundred other things happening outside this sleepy market and its merchants with greedy eyes. And when she closes her eyes Amaunet is somewhere else too, a match in her grasp and a deadwood forest in her shadow.
In the distant a band starts to play and a poet starts to sing. Her spine starts to itch again and even the weight of her cloak and regalia (the one that marks her as almost queen of this stretch of gutter) do little to soothe the burn and scratch of it. Each bit of gold on her feels like a blade sinking in, like a bit of stone woven into her mane before she's tossed into the sea. Amaunet want's to toss each of them into the fire, smelt them down to arrow and sword.
Tonight in the twilight she longs for the desert, and blood, and anything that makes her feel alive, alive, alive.
Tonight underneath the bruised sky she wants to feel anything but tame. Anything at all is better than tame, even dead. Her wings flutter and spread out, swallowing up the space around her a warning to a lingering rat scuttling too close. But there is longing too, in the tremble of them in the cooling spring night as if they've been bound up in chain. She presses herself into the gathering crowd just to settle the feeling.
And if eyes linger on the girl with her wings spread wide as a queen of violence they are not foolish enough to say anything to her. Wise of them, with the darkness brewing in the corner of her golden gaze like a bloodstain on a bit of virgin silk. For a moment though, when the poetry turns to song, that her itch starts to blaze like a line of soot and ember. Amaunet turns.
She smiles, a star-bright look that airs on the side of feral. It's a look that promises a hundred terrible, perfect, impossible moments. It's a look that might cleave thrones from the hooves of men. “My king.” The distance between them trembles like her wings as she closes it and lifts her head instead of dips it like a decorous citizen might. Beneath her golden banded and braided hair, the gold of her eyes blaze and the bloodstain spreads like cracks in a vase.
And when a feather brushes against him, like a wayward hair caught in a breeze, Amaunet only blinks long and slow as a startled thing while the bruised twilight starts to feel as heavy as a dying thing.
The Sovereign burns in the twilight like a forgotten ember. A spark, having vaulted too far from the flame, burns more brightly because of it. And more transiently. So it is with Orestes who, in the dying day, radiates with all the sun’s lingering brilliance. There are few citizens willing, or capable, of holding his gaze in such a state; and the Sovereign knows if he were to bleed, it would drip like molten gold and burn the cobblestones beneath. He feels hot. Seething. It has little to do with the sunset and everything to do with the way there is an itching, creeping restlessness beneath his skin. There is a part of him that in that moment wants to do nothing but run, run, run, until there is nothing left in him but fatigue and sweat, nothing left but his breathing and the raging beat of his heart.
But such pleasures escape the Sovereign. Orestes cannot, for all his wants, neglect the needs of Solterra. And so he wanders the Court; practicing pleasantries, speaking to those who he has painstakingly learned the names and occupations of. He is courteous, gracious, everything a Sovereign ought to be and more. He attempts to reel in the flaring, burning glow of his magic; he attempts to settle the pebbles that gravitate from the ground and encircle his ankles. He smiles and laughs, joking with the bread-maker and blacksmith. There is still much in Solterra that is broken. There is still much outside his power. But beneath his jovial exterior a small sun burns, and burns, and burns—
There is a poet singing in the markets. The string instrument echoes and the voice carries with the song.
I want you to know one thing
You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch near the fire
the impalpable ash
or teh wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Orestes, no matter where he ventures, cannot escape the song. It is a favourite of the travelling bard. His name—Julius—is one Orestes has committed to memory. Later in the evening he will compliment the artist on his skilful use of verse and melody. Later in the evening Orestes will again proclaim his love for the song Julius sings, If You Forget Me, and by doing so Orestes will prolong his own suffering. Perhaps the bard will not play the song for a few evenings; but it will always reappear, as Julius believes it pleases the Sovereign.
Yet it pleases Orestes in the way of an exquisite, delectable pain. It pleases him because it makes him suffer.
The melody follows down a dark alleyway; it follows as he glances toward the fading, bruise-coloured horizon. It follows past the fountain and past the merchants, past gutter-children and rats, past a stray dog and a pregnant mare, past a line of playing children--
Well now if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.
If suddenly you forget me, do not look for me
for I shall have already forgotten you.
If you think it long and mad, the wind of banners
that passes through my life, and you decide
to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots,
remember that on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off to seek another land.
Orestes takes a moment to rest. He presses his forehead against the cool sandstone of a dark, private alleyway. It calms the pounding of his blood. It placates the burning of his magic.
But if each day, each hour
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness, if each day
a flower climbs up your lips to seek me
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved
and as long as you live it will be in your arms,
without leaving mine.
The stone has already heated with his magic and, anyway, there are more vendors to visit, more citizens to discuss Court affairs with, more—
Orestes, perhaps you ought return to the citadel?—
and this comes from Ariel, who has slunk silently to his bonded’s flank. Uncharacteristically, Orestes leans into the pressure—briefly, to steel himself. No, everything is fine—let’s just, finish the rounds—
And so they do.
Or, they would have. But Orestes is interrupted. It is the first encounter that breaks Orestes from the habitual stupor, the dazed and distracted routine—coloured, of course, by the added complication of his nonexistent memory and the itch, the sensation that the song sung by the bard ought mean something more to him. There is a striking woman turning toward him, as Julius's voice grows in boldness, as the poem moves from recitation to true song.
The bard is repeating the last lines of the poem, pitching them higher, lacing them with a riveting melody—
My king.
This girl burns. Orestes is struck first by her beauty, and then by the fact he cannot place her.
She does not dip her head respectfully; she raises it, and the gesture, defiant and powerful, strikes him with an uncharacteristic violence. The responding thought rises in his mind clear, resonant. I want to break her.
Orestes swallows. If her eyes blaze then he does tenfold; the golden light that seeps from him brightens, brightens, and the sand whips up at his feet. He responds slowly, perhaps overly focused on keeping the twilight at bay, on ensuring she cannot hold his gaze for too long. For a moment longer, there is no fading sun; Solterra’s heat and fury radiates from the Sovereign’s tattoos, his skin, it seeps from each and every pore. The brush of her feather incites him further, further, further.
“My lady,” he returns. There is something sultry in the tone, something that is as evocative as that slight brush of her against him. “We have not met before.”
It has taken him the entire night to realise the thing that brews deep within him, the thing that radiates from his flesh like sunlight, like starlight, the thing that causes the sand to dance and the stones to gravitate—
it is fury.
He recognises it for the first time, perhaps, because he thinks he sees it reflected in the proud lines of her face and the splintered embers of her eyes. At last, he stills his magic; the gesture is abrupt and absolute. Where there was once gold, there is silver. Where there was once light, there is darkness. The last light of the sun on the distant horizon is the colour of blood; he can barely make out, now, the colour of her eyes, the striking nature of her appearance. Yet Orestes knows it is there. He had seen it so violently highlighted by his own raging light. In the quiet darkness he adds, "And how is it we have not met before?"
“The forest rose like a dream
from the mind of Chaos’s lonely daughter
and the sun fell heavy and thick
to warm the blood of a world"
The king is mad.
It is the first thought she thinks when the sovereign starts to burn and the dirt starts to gravitate towards him like small pieces of stardust trying to come home. The brightness of him highlights the brightness of her. She can see the reflection of her regalia in his smoldering and the kaleidoscope of her gold painting his skin in colors flashing like comets. Amaunet smiles with teeth and something darker than that. It's a smile of a girl looking at the sun after a year of darkness.
Her smile is one of chaos looking at a young flame and saying, come, come, come home.
Amaunet's own glow, the fury of her magic, welcomes in all his brightness, all his gravity tugging her closer, closer, closer like another bit of the desert begging entrance into the cracks of his form. Above it, even when she starts to glow (a soft star to his devouring sun), Amaunet does not change that slow blink of her eyes. She can feel the heat of his light, the sting of it, pressing against the blackness like a kiss. Below her own violence, her own itch, she cannot help but to think that it would be an adventure to let him burn her, to devour her in sunlight and firelight until there was nothing but ash left.
But she would burn him too, she knows, in the consuming. Davke are not things to be plucked apart like flags in a war; but kings might be. Even now her wings have not settled despite the lazy blink of her eyes, rather they rustle like spring leaves in a storm. They sing like a hawk's wings do when plummeting through the sky towards a snake in the tall-grass.
And it is not until he settles his magic, like a beast-master tugging at a rope around a lion's neck, that Amaunet lets her wings slide back to her sides. She almost misses the brush of his fury on the tips of them. Almost.
Once he quiets his brightness and swallowed it up to become more silver, she closes the distance between them. There is no part of her made for running from fires, and kings, and stallions who look at her like a thing to be charred. Always she runs towards: to danger, to fury, to violence, and molten kings. She brushes her nose to his, a greeting older than the stone at their feet. Like they are wild things instead of civilized things.
If only for tonight.
“You did not know you should have been looking for me.” Amaunet's voice is nothing more than a whisper of the sand that was reaching for him only moment ago begging to be let in. There is no sea, no fury, no sunlight in her voice. Nor is there shyness when her look suggests hurt at the idea that he does not know who she is (it's disappointment).
He clearly has not been walking the right paths through his court. The king is only walking the tame part of his city, only the civilized parts.
Until now--
Until the brush of her lips against the place where a crown should rest across his brow.
It is the first time Orestes realises his magic is the magic of consumption; the magic of acute violence, to which he is enthralled. There is a moment when her glow answers, when he stares into eyes that make him think, inexplicably, of exploding stars and colliding galaxies—yes, perhaps one day he will thank her—and in that moment Orestes thinks, this is what I was meant to be all along. Is this not his final, complete form? The one to which he is Bound, irrevocably? Is this moment not where the very Fates have led him?
Who is to say he is not godlike, who is to say that with light pouring from his eyes and his skin like ichor he is not, perhaps, divine? And in this divine comedy—or ought it be a tragedy?—Orestes finds everything he is irresistibly drawn to everything she is. Especially his magic. Especially the slight pull of gravity, the dancing of sand at his hooves, more, more, more—
because what is a star if not destined to become a black hole? The chaos in her calls to the sun in him. If Amaunet had not caught the king in such a mood that his star-bright blood turned end-over-end in discontent, their meeting may have been different. The encounter may have remained innocent, a Sovereign and a citizen. It is when he restrains his magic that she lowers her wings; it is when he restrains his magic that she closes the distance between them to brush noses, and Ariel snarls at his side. There is no undoing this, not when the touch makes his magic sing, and sing, and sing beneath the cool silver of his skin. Inside, he is burning.
You did not know you should have been looking for me.
“No, I did not,” and Orestes’s voice emerges darkly, huskily. It is the desert beneath a velveteen black sky.
Stop, Ariel thinks through their bond.
And for once, Orestes says no.
Her lips are at his brow. He says, “You already know my name. What is yours, girl-who-does-not-fear-burning?” It is in her eyes, that fearlessness, that thrill he recognises as… well, his memories are too fogged for Orestes to determine why or how he recognises it, but he does.
And that is enough, for tonight.
He steps forward and just as she had touched his brow, he touches the edge of her wing; his lips, a feather-soft brush. He almost says, introduce yourself, but his magic is still singing, and in the melodrama that belongs to poets and warrior-kings, Orestes thinks:
I already know her as my end.
Although, Orestes cannot not say why; only that in a minute of knowing her, she had taught him more of his magic than anyone or anything else. She has accepted its anger, and not flinched.
“The forest rose like a dream
from the mind of Chaos’s lonely daughter
and the sun fell heavy and thick
to warm the blood of a world"
Amaunet does not turn to the lion as he snarls with his mouthful of teeth and his predator eyes spilling light like a wound spills blood. She does not look, but her feathers quiver with a thrill older than the sand and stone at their hooves. Beneath her skin her blood races and sparks like lightning, like she's a storm roiling inside the too-fragile form of a girl. Somewhere thunder is echoing like a bass drum, somewhere the sky is cracking open with light, somewhere a spear is glittering in the twilight like an eye watching the world tick, tick, tick by without a cause.
Somewhere, when she closes her eyes, there is another her, another girl with bloody warpaint and a hungry soul, setting match to dead-wood. Somewhere an inferno is starting to smoke.
But here, the king is pressing his nose to her feathers like she's air instead of skin and bone. Here she is tracing the curl of his neck even as the lion snarls on the outskirts of all their touching places begging to become thunder and light. Amaunet whispers a laugh into the hair at his withers. “I think I prefer girl-who-does-not-fear-burning.” Her voice is the desert under the twilight, a strange suggestion of light that hasn't yet turned black as oil. It's a touch, a feeling, a thrill of all the things the darkness brings. And it comes with a tug of his mane, not hard enough to sting but perhaps hard enough to make him shiver.
“Can I keep it?” She pulls away with a quiver, like the coldness has crept in to drag caresses down her spine. Perhaps the coldness is braver, without their fury to rage against it. Perhaps the darkness feels closer than it should, here in the city of the sun (the city that burns again, and again, and again).
The city, that like its king, has yet to discover which direction it needs to follow to find the end.
Amaunet gestures with a wing, a silent follow me, in a language all of them have always known down in the marrow of their bones. Or maybe her feathers are only saying, keep up, or devour me. Or maybe they are only feathers rustling a song in the wind, maybe there is nothing more to it than that.
Her necklace whispers against the silk of her cloak which in turns whispers against the stone (each whisper like a secret to the heart of her being revealed). “Where were you walking to?” Her smile is a heavy thing, weighted with all the somewhere, and here, and almost things that could be between them. The look is bold, too bold perhaps, for the way she takes the name the king has given her, his violence and nothing else.
Always she has been too bold-- blade bold, desert bold, destruction bold. She's restless, here with this moment of stillness between their touches, the poet, and the lion.
Perhaps it is the desert in him; the desert that has always belonged to the border of the sea. The sand that creeps into every orifice; that can never be swept completely away. The desert that the wind whips into a storm of sand and shard. The desert that bakes too-hot with the sun mid-sky. His magic pulls, and pulls, and pulls; he closes his eyes around; he tries to tug it in, in, in, and it bubbled up uncontainable light. Uncontainable burning and
does that hot, possessive fury not come from Solis himself? Even Ariel’s snarl is a part of Orestes now or, at least, becoming a part of him. And this woman with her strange magic, with her luminescent eyes, she feels a part of the desert too. She reminds him of a time he cannot remember, with a faceless herd of horses who ran some nights beneath a full moon and keened, keened, keened an Old Magic, who danced on the edge of life and dipped their hands into the pools of death, the owners of everything and nothing. They had lived; and the memory makes his mouth leaden even as she laughs at his withers. It makes him leaden even as she traces the curl of his neck, a voice that belongs to something as other as he had once been. She tugs her mane and he knows the precise feeling of running into danger.
“Of course.” His mouth tongue curls oddly around the word. Orestes speaks more darkly than he would have otherwise, then he ever has before. He adds, with caution:
“But there’s power in a naming.”
Where were you walking to? I could walk with you. Orestes knows all about gravity. The weigh it is not so much a suggestion as a necessity, as an inescapable pull. He knows it because when he burns his brightest things come to him, and his is what he feels here. Ariel pads in behind him, presses close, all luminous eyes and bristled gold fur. The lion steps between them with enough fury and force Orestes nearly takes a step back—and then he does.
But Orestes smiles a smile edged like a knife. He says, “I was walking only to think. Perhaps I could walk with you. I feel the night would be more memorable that way.”
Those who have known him well—of which in Novus there are none, and outside of Novus all of them are dead—might recognise the haphazard smile, the edge of recklessness that possesses him. Orestes’s own kind of boldness, and the most dangerous kind.
As a man of duty, responsibility, crushing obligation… he does not simply walk for the sake of walking, often. And when he does it is because he remembers a little too fondly the abandon of the fistfight, the cliff-face, the sea in a storm, or the desert walking alone—
“Take me somewhere.” And this the King demands. And then, with eyes as fathomless as the ocean he once loved, he asks: "And what name would you give me, girl-who-does-not-fear-burning?" He says it with all the softness of a lover, all the sultry intonations of a man in a bedroom. Smouldering. Too-hot, too-hot.
“The forest rose like a dream
from the mind of Chaos’s lonely daughter
and the sun fell heavy and thick
to warm the blood of a world"
They are two different stars pulsing with the furies of suns. Amaunet can see the fire in him, banked and dull, when the lion presses between them with spit dripping out between his snarling teeth. She trembles for the feel of fur against her side, and the feel of rage knocking at the ivory gates of her magic. Her wings snap against the lion and her teeth bare themselves back in a snarl.
The line of paint across her face shines like fresh blood when her glow turns to gold. Beneath it, and that lick of magic, every bit of her trembles for the fall into violence, into desert-born fury. She almost slips into it when the knife-sharp glare of his smile settles something ravenous in her skin. The smile she offers back is shark-sharp, lion-sharp, dangerous-girl sharp. Her mouth might as well be full of stars for all the brightness of it.
“Of course.” The echo of his words is not dark on her lips. It's fire and moonlight when she laughs around the same sound his lips curled like a cage around. Goosebumps race down the sides of her spine. She steps around the lion (and resists plucking at the mane ringing his neck just to see how deep his snarl might bloom). “But walking is no way to think.” And this time when she snaps her wings it's against his side before they settle above their heads like a canopy tucking them away from the rest of the world.
Somewhere beyond this canopy of feathers, silk and golden light, the poet starts to strum a violin. Ancient lovers press their cheeks together in the crowd and start to dream of the years where they were young and immortal. Children start to dance and tuck cactus flowers in their manes. The city comes to life.
But here, between the king and the girl-who-does-not-fear-burning, there is only darkness edging the light. There is only the possibility of so many things in the places where the lion does not glare.
Amaunet pulls at his mane again. Hard. “Things like us are made to run while we wonder. We are made to be wild, and free, and faster than a comet.” She pauses and scrapes her lips down his cheek. We are made to rule the world. This she thinks but does not say. It lives only in the sun-bright flash of her golden eyes as she blinks slowly as if she's only just now rising from slumber. Like she's only just now remember that she was once something else.
“Keep up king-who-does-not-know-how-to-burn, or I might be forced to leave you behind. ” She laughs and crashes through the crowd, wings spread wide as a harpy, as the crowd parts around her like lambs. And even when she breaks past the crowd, and the market, and the garden, she does not stop her wild gallop.
Not even to see if the King with his snarling lion, was brave enough to follow.
Ariel, more often than acting as guardian, as guidance, feels as if his purpose is entirely to bear witness. Even as he warns Orestes, Orestes finds himself unbearably attracted to the dangerous appeal of this woman. She is the same wild darkness of the sea in the storm; of the sun on a windy, midsummer day in the desert; the stars when they fall. And her smile, her smile, possesses all the gravity of a disaster, and a black hole.
Of course she says, above the lion’s rumbling snarl. But walking is no way to think.
She snaps her wings again, but now against his side; the gesture causes a sharp sort of stinging, which Orestes almost relishes. Then she settles them above them, blocking the stars, blocking the light of the city. The poet is strumming his violin. The music reaches into the dark, and Amaunet tugs his mane hard enough Orestes almost exclaims in pain. But he doesn’t. He lets his golden glow light up the dark of her wings and, things like us are made to run while we wonder. Her lips touch his cheek and Orestes thinks, like a sigh before sleep, Marisol. But he is already consumed by this strange woman’s burning.
Keep up king-who-does-not-know-how-to-burn, or I might be forced to leave you behind. Orestes laughs with her; it does not take long for him to coil his haunches and launch after her. Ariel releases a roar into the night; and if the crowd did not part for Amaunet’s impressive charge, they would for the Sovereign and his Bonded, alight like small stars.
Orestes assumed she would stop past the crowd; he had thought, quite ignorantly, she would still at least past the garden, or among the market, or as they thundered past the violinist’s rising song. But the girl-who-does-not-fear-burning does not stop—and because she does not stop, neither does Orestes.
Not even when she breaks past the Court and into the open desert beyond.
The fresh night air greets him; he is lathered in sweat, and marvels at her speed. Their wild gallop leads them further, into the soft sands and the starry night beyond. From behind her he shouts,
“You’ll have to do better than that!” Although his voice comes out broken with his breath, there is a part of Orestes that feels as if he can run forever, especially in such a cool desert night. Seeing her trail ahead of him, Orestes increases the speed of his gallop to near her; playfully, he stretches out his neck to nip at her billowing tail.
“The forest rose like a dream
from the mind of Chaos’s lonely daughter
and the sun fell heavy and thick
to warm the blood of a world"
The thrill of the run, and of the steady drumbeat of his hooves behind her (like a beast nipping at her shadows wishing for flesh, and blood, and bone), races through her with all the violent glory of a harpoon thrust through her heart. Adrenaline races through her blood in veins of storm-fire, driving her on through the desert like a wave racing over the shore in a riptide. Her spine vibrates and hums electric as her wings catch the air like banners instead of a weapons.
And a part of her, a very small part, pauses before sliding comet-quick down the side of dune. It wonders what it would feel like to let him catch her like a lion and wrap his dull teeth around her throat like the bottom of a noose.
The king-who-does-not-know-how-to-burn is not quick enough to catch her. Not tonight, not with the storm-veins in her form and her magic pulling from him like a tornado from the wind. He would have to earn her submission, and tonight (oh, it's a night for so many things) it is not her fall that the desert is bellowing for through the soft howl of a midsummer breeze.
The sting of his teeth at her back is nothing more than another stab of that harpoon. It opens up another hole for the light, and hunger, and danger to pour into. She's flooded with it all--
His light. Her light. The vibration of the sand beneath her hooves, the way it's tapping out a silent message she'll understand.
I am thirsty, the sand seems to say.
Hurry. It roars.
She laughs to the melody of the sand and of their hooves pounding louder than their hearts. This is what it feels like to be a god, she thinks, this reckless feel of pulling the tide instead of drowning in it. This is what it feels like to be wildfire, to devour up the world just because it's kindling. Her laughter turns to song as they race up the next dune. Even his lion seems like such a small thing as she snaps her wings and turns to him with violence and lust warring in her moon-bright gaze.
“I have only just begun.” When she leaps into the air before plummeting towards the belly of the desert the wind almost seems to roar through her feathers and regalia--
And it turns the start of her challenge into something that sounds more like we than I.
Enshrouded in a veil of darkness brought on by the fall of night, Avdotya waits. She listens with the patience of a practiced hunter, like a wolf waiting for the flock to wander just far enough to put themselves within reach of tooth and claw; she waits, but it is Amaunet who first leads the game, engaging Orestes - o’ Sun King of Solterra - in the folly of a chase through the capitol and finally through its open gates. Her own skin prickles with growing anticipation, but still the viper remains like a statue.
Her eyes follow the billowing trail of dust that blooms behind them and then, only as the pair disappears over the crest of a dune, does she throw herself into a hurtling gallop. She eats up the desert with her stride, powerful and strong and hungry as ever, like she has never run before and never will again. Avdotya races to diminish what distance there is between them, looking back only to observe her magic taking hold of the dust and containing it around her like a thick fog on a cool autumn evening. The further the Khan gets, the larger it swells, until she is entirely surrounded and it starts to reach ahead of her and over the horizon.
It is the first to reach Amaunet and Orestes, crawling eerily around the sovereign’s heels first and then collecting further down the rolling dune Amaunet had just leapt from. When she lands, the dust seems to settle with her, dropping almost instantly to the desert as if it were never there- except now, Avdotya is standing beside her fellow Davke, looking up to where Orestes should inevitably be appearing.
She smiles, if one could call the minute twitch of her lip a smile.
”She truly is a thing to behold, isn’t she?” Avdotya cannot fault him for getting tangled in Amaunet’s web. What man wouldn’t? But now, now he finds himself ensared in the nest, and it is a moment too late to cut himself free.
