BECAUSE I PROMISE I'LL LIGHT THE BEACONS
OF YOUR DIMMED AND HOLLOW SOUL
EVEN IF I HAVE TO STEAL THE FIRE
FROM A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS
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.
Too close to the edge.
@Amaunet
