Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.


The game does not last long, the hidden one quickly revealed.

I look to him, only now realizing that I should have noticed the familiarity of the voice echoing about me, rather than the familiar fear now embedded in my heart. I should have wondered if, this far north, he’d be here, his dark eyes always watching the horizon for friends that had left him to an empty, stone palace wreathed in ice, and memories.

Each time we meet I see it more clearly, those stark lines of sadness, where once there had only been the subtle curvature of childish surprise, and laughter. He tries to hide it from me, like I suppose he always has, but, this time, in the shadow of the forest of icicles and silence, I see it. I hear it in his words, too, and it feels like all the warmth is bulled out of my lungs momentarily as I feel their weight settle down, over the now-understood influence of the ghostly question before. My ears flick back atop my head, golden eyes searching his face for seconds, moments, gazing into the cold expression on his face and wondering if, maybe, I’ve lost him to the ebb of time, as I had others.

"I haven’t been hiding," is sternly state, at last, "not from what you think, anyway."

I’d been hiding from more hurt, a deeper sense of not belonging; running away head long from mistakes, words I didn’t mean, and a failed desire to become more than I was. I certainly had not been running from Erebos, a steady peak on the distant horizon of reality…

I’d been running from the tethers between us, and the potential repercussions of their severing. I’d had enough of being smacked and left bloody by the lines I’d bound to others, in a hope to stay afloat, and steady in the sea of the world. It was enough to make someone want to cut the lines, and head out to the horizon, winding up wherever they wound up, without scars left by that which was supposed to protect them. Being alone seemed a small cost for the freedom of the heart, and a lack of wounds marring it.

But what would he know of intentional loneliness? Even with his losses, he has more light left to him than I do. He spoke to me of hope, the last we met, when I met him with the challenge of the futility of this world. There is a middle ground between both, I’m sure, but I don’t know how to walk it. I barely know how to deal with what I’ve done, and who I am, let alone what way is the most comfortable in this world of thorns, and fires.

"I put too much emphasis on what others think, is all, and.... There is no place for left to me here, brother," I explain, diverting from the most painful truth, to the lesser truth; I look about the still woodland with the old, homesick sorrow welling in the glimmer of my gilded gaze, a shine which I attempt to disguise when I look back at him, "I am not understood, and my goals are not supported. I will never be proud of myself if I keep allowing myself to be torn down by those who were meant to uphold me, or if I allow others to create who I am."

Stepping towards him, I offer a smile, a sad one; the grimace of a boy becoming a man, learning his way in the world, and hoping to not lose all of his comforts in the process. Perhaps it is selfish of me to still want Erebos’ friendship, considering my distance, and my wandering nature; perhaps I ask too much and give too little, arriving too late to be remembered as much more than the boy who was once a friend, now but faded memories, and a familiar grin.

I will still love him, regardless, for what its worth.

"I never have the right words, anyway… I’m sure you know that," I say, a lopsided smile growing from the pitiful thing which had lingered there before, "that was mother’s thing. All I seem to be really good at is breaking shit."