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The prince attempted a trial at normalcy – branching out across the unfreezing lake, hooves powerful, potent, along the serene surface, like a beast of the seas, like a tempestuous wave, poised gallantly despite all of the tangled knots curled in his chest. He thought nothing about death and demise, he thought nothing of perils and trials, the ferocity of the world crashing down around him, or the hazardous wake of destruction he yearned to wreak. Instead, he fought.
It was a calm serenade of his savage arts, an intricate maneuver of beasts, fiends, and vermin, crashing along the rippling waves like a titan, pushing off the veneer with disastrous speed, stretching his stride until it seemed he’d crash into the opposing embankment, then coiling, snaking, his body in a feral twist to unleash agony and unholy cataclysms the other way. He tucked his head low, predatory, wolfish, then struck the air with his sword, slashing invisible enemies and opponents with the mighty cutlass, a dastardly rapier, pretending ghosts and wraiths had lined up for his taking, meeting their marker with an abhorrent laceration, a vicious slide of annihilation.
It was freedom and weightlessness, to fight, to defend, to protect, granting and giving him something to do other than mourn and sob, wallow in his grief, set up pretenses and unearthly smiles that rarely met his eyes. He could pretend the realm was his, the empire wasn’t sinking, that the earth didn’t shatter, that friends didn’t disappear, become hurt, and that fathers didn’t die.
But the fantasy and delusion faded when Orsino spotted others at the border, and the boy was forced back into his General’s role – features rendered away from their cold, inhospitable grandeur (when his mind had been solely occupied by the bite, the menace, the malice of taking down a fellow heathen), tucked back into a passive reluctance, leaving the edges of their portion of sea, and following over the rimes and notes of the inner valley. His eyes lifted along the towering, crumbling sentinels (what was to become of them again, aged and decrepit?), to the figures gathered below it, one recognizable because of her distinct coloring (blue like his, but brighter, deeper, like the ocean – his mother had given him the taste and relish of rain and showers), and the other wholly unfamiliar.
The boy approached out of necessity, out of curiosity, and because it was something else to do, to keep him occupied from the lingering touch of phantoms, of tossing himself off the nearest ravine. A grin postured itself across his lips (a little too forced, and he was sure Tiamat would see past the façade, but he couldn’t bring himself to care), and his gaze segmented upon the pair, interested, inquiring, but playing the part of amiable cretin first and foremost. “Hello Tiamat,” he brightened, pretending and pretending until the pretenses felt standard and typical too (but his heart still hurt), pausing to linger upon the stranger – younger than he, but much broader, powerful (built for warfare?). “And greetings to you,” he nodded his head, a touch of the regal, noble son inching its way out, past the warfare, past the honed muscles, past the coiled, curled, carved edges. “I’m Erebos. Who are you?”
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