He would have loved to bask in the glow of his father’s love, sagacity, and boldness along the intertwining dunes, half-listening to the cry of the gulls and the sanction of the waves, but the world had deigned they parted on mysteries, on deaths, on stories horrifying and bleak. The Reaper was forced to draw himself together again with no potential for the past, with no arts or spells to cast them into a hold of family and loyalty – he’d lost his way too many seasons ago. But to listen, to hear, to see, his father, even as a ghost with coals and embers, was enough (even if he couldn’t fight the longing, the yearning, buried and locked and sequestered in the nefarious annals of his blistered, scorched, embittered heart). The Lord was riveted, the King was plunged, down into the wake of memories and the finery of yesterdays, exploring the vivid contemplations his sire had to offer from beyond the grave: questioning his finery, not being tainted or succumbed by his dominance, by his supremacy, and he nearly wanted to lower his head and laugh – because naught was safe, naught was sacred, naught was ever written with anything but strife, danger, and treachery. Helovia offered them castles and riches, and took them away just as quickly as they’d been gathered. He’d watched souls he’d thought loyal turn their backs to him because they weren’t chosen, he’d listened to banshees scream at him from the top of their lungs, and he’d been reduced to shambles, to ruins, to splinters and fractures, of what he used to be. No conquering, no triumphant banners, no glittering reams of glory and rapture; just the twist of the knife, just the edge of the blade, shoved down through his shoulders and out through his chest.
 
Ignatius ultimately crowned him ignorant at his next set of words, and to that the once-child, the once-prince, he once-future of the Tides did bow his head in shame, standing amidst the caves like a stricken youth. He didn’t know his people except as a mass of power, and no matter how much he presided over their hardships, no matter how many times he’d led them into sanctuaries or into battles, he only varnished a few faces, a few laughs, a few dreamers and their aspirations. He bled his soul into the roots of the firs and the avenues of the tundra and the wicked, deceitful rime of the glaciers, and he fought for their world so many times over, without asking them what they wanted, what they craved. He presumed, he assumed, he clung to avaricious grandeur and dastardly rapiers, and then billowed into the void as if he were naught but a mere stroke on the wind. Something cracked along his chest, and it burned, bright and vivid and soulless, a gaping wound unseen. He’d lost his herd before he’d even touched the throne, because it was easier to be apart, to be unaware, to be indifferent, then to give himself over to anyone or anything.
 
The beast wanted to fight against his father’s advice, but they were too damning, too true, too right. So instead of balking, instead of gnawing against his teeth, he remained subservient to the fires of wisdom, and still bent his head towards the earth. “I understand. Thank you.” Comprehension was one thing – committing to the action was another one altogether. He would have yearned to open his mouth wide and relinquish all the queries boiling across his tongue (how how how when they disappeared from him or when they offered him smiles and he had nothing in return but silence and iniquity?), but Ignatius boiled again, simmered along distant memories and the flood of days before his boy became stone, became rubble, became ruin. He had loved the sea, the touch, the taste, the feeling of power, the haze of rain scattered across his soul, the manifestation of elements clashing, rolling, colliding, melding and molding, but he didn’t speak of her, of the Tides or the ocean-girl, just flicked his downcast eyes towards his father’s burning stature and christened a promise, a pledge, a conviction. “I do.” They were in every inch of his soul, every fiber of his soulless, heartless presence, and they glimmered and dimmed throughout his days, restless and dreaming. He just never managed to find them.