Oyedeng

You only feel it when it's lost

Getting through still has a cost

Quietly, it slips through your fingers, love

Falling from you drop by drop

Three bells after midnight. Hour of the wolf. 

Even during the age of twilight, for a thousand dayless years, the hour of the wolf had been when the shadows were the longest. It was an hour of contemplation, and, more often than not, of solitude.

A single candle kept the darkness at bay tonight, but no amount of burning wax and cotton could stave off the suffocating feeling of isolation creeping up on Lazuli's heart.

"It is strange, is it not?" Lazuli whispered, staring into the flame. "How fate toys with us."

A gentle gust danced through the room. The candle flickered, and for a moment its light, reflected silvery by the corpse, made the wooden walls look like the skies on a cloudy day. Lazuli felt the sudden urge to chuckle. Nothing came out. 

"My pampa used to tell me stories about it, sasa ke? About the silver golem that walked out of the sea and became a krownmang. A living legend is what it was. Only, not so living any more." 

The night was silent, seemingly deaf to his musing. Lazuli ran his thumb along the blade of his axe, just below the edge, very carefully. He'd never sharpened the heirloom, but it would undoubtedly cut right through his skin. Àlvaro would make a joke about felling trees if he was here now. 

"Did you know they're siblings, in a way? Kairos and", he gently tapped the blade, "this. Legendary artifacts beyond our comprehension. They're meant to be.. constants, are they not? Immortal. Perpetual."

This time, the night answered, her raspy voice barely louder than the breeze.

"Nating fo sempere, mi pensa." This time Lazuli actually produced something that passed for a laugh, although it could just as well have been a bark. "Soya. the evidence seems to suggest as much."

The king tipped his head sideways, in the vague direction of Qen's voice. "Tell me a story, stormwraith. About Kairos. From the years before."

The treehouse floor creaked ever so slightly as Qen's silhouette peeled itself out of the shadows. Lazuli wondered if she had deliberately chosen to cause that noise so he wouldn't be startled. The corners of his mouth twitched in amusement. The warrior leaned forward, placing a hand on the edge of Kairos' improvised coffin. The ereluf carpenters had hastily put together something between a transport box and a coffin in the style of the main land. For safe keeping, Lazuli had told them. His fist still ached from how hard he'd clenched it.

When Qen spoke, her voice was coarse as sand and her words flowed out slowly, like they were dripping down an hour glass one by one. "This is the first time we meet, ya? Or.. not meet. See each other. Don't think I ever told anyone but Zoye about this." She sighed. There was a deep fragility in her posture. Lazuli noticed she always got like that when she mentioned the late queen, and Qen didn't like being weak, so he didn't make her talk about Zoye often. He knew she'd open up when she felt ready. Maybe ready was now. 

"Kairos was krownmang already, then. Zoye had it and Uro, but there ought to be three. Always have been, always will be. Two are too few, four aren't close enough. There ought to be three. There was going to be a tourney. Everyone knew. The Seterax were going to send a group of champions. No group of krownmang without a Seterax."

Qen sighed. Her eyes were a thousand years away, looking straight through Kairos. 

"Not that I cared. Was too deep in booze back then, me. Queen was going to come visit, big feast. All the champions looking to make themselves known before the tourney. Evening before, I sneak into one of the wine cellars. Appears when they make you into an ubicha, breaking into a tavern basement becomes pretty easy all of a sudden. The practice helped also. Did it about three times a week." 

Lazuli considered the woman in front of him. Her predatory prowess. The silent threat each of her movements bore. Her lynx-like stride. He tried to imagine her lying in a ditch, the stench of wine and her own sick all over her. He failed. But even if his curiosity had betrayed his poker face, Qen didn't notice. Her mind was too far away to read his expression, even if she'd been looking straight at him. 

"Don't remember how I got there, but I must have had my last drink in the prismatic garden. Beautiful place, that. I understand it was destroyed in the war, but the Seterax are stubborn. They rebuilt it every time. You been?" 

Lazuli had. During his time as a field healer, he had been to the seterax capital a few times, and once he'd had enough time to spare for a visit to the garden. As savage as the Seterax presented themselves, their druidic artists were unrivaled among their peers. The prismatic gardens housed plants of all colours, pampa Almonyis had told Lazuli once. His brief stay in the gardens had thoroughly changed the young healers definition of all colours, though. He still sometimes dreamed of the place and its dizzying flood of visual sensations.

This time Qen did look at him. She must have recognized the dreamy, distant look in his eyes as the memory that it was, and nodded in agreement. It was a delicate movement, almost as if her jaw could shatter the moment if she moved it too suddenly.

"I wake. Drilling headache, cotton mouth. Stomach hurts like a stab wound. First I am not sure what woke me, then I hear voices. The gardeners coming to kick me out, I think. So I sit up. Yew tree in my back, pleasant to lean on. And then I see them."

A smile crossed Qen's face, deep and full of infinite admiration. 

Lazuli's fa-, no, his pampa, had once taught him that most people were only capable of letting one or two others look into their deepest hearts, where they were naked and raw. When he turned from a little sapling into a man, he learned that it was true, like most things Almonyis said. It was terrifying, revealing to others the very essence of your self. And yet, after all Qen had been through, she was sharing it with him this very moment. The king felt his throat tighten.

"Right across the path, under a redwood. Zoye always laughed about the symbolism, later. To me it is a tree, then and later. Takes me a moment to understand I see the queen and her krownmang. They were worlds away, then. Just a killer with a hangover, me. I see something flutter, it lands on Kairos' shoulder. It is a hummingbird. Kairos, it freezes. Then, very slowly, it nudges its hood off its head, turns it. Sees the hummingbird on its shoulder and me in the distance." 

Qen was quietly weeping now. The tears streamed down her cheeks, forming tiny rivulets in the wrinkles of her skin. Lazuli had never witnessed her like this. "I feel so.. seen, sasa ke? So ashamed. Very aware of my shape, all of a sudden. But it just.." She sobbed, once. Gathered herself, trying to find the words. "it just says.." another sob, another moment of silence. "An aimless bird, my queen. Look, it is beautiful."

The krownmang's fingers dug into the casket, trembling. Her tears dripped from her cheeks onto Kairos' head, making it look like they were both crying. To his surprise, Lazuli realised he was crying as well. For a heartbeat, he pondered what a great storyteller Qen would have made if her life had taken a different turn.

"And Zoye, she turns and looks past it. Sees me, nods. Her purple eyes hold no disgust, not a shred. She looks at me with only compassion and love. Me, sasa ke? Me! Do you believe it is the first time someone calls me beautiful and looks like they mean it? I took my first life at four, when I didn't even know what it meant. Many others followed. An instrument of murder, me. Reeking of sweat and wine. And they call me beautiful."

Qen wailed. It was a painful sound, like a cub finding its mother dead. Lazuli noticed his jaw was seconds from cramping. He started to loosen the muscles with his palms and felt that his face was soaked, so much had he been crying. The tension of the battle and the grief over Kairos' death flowed out of him and left only emptiness. It was scary, but he knew the void could be filled with something better. This, too, his father had taught him. He was too emotionally exhausted to correct himself. Almonyis was his father, regardless of whether or not Lazuli was of his seed.

"Zoye comes over, offers me a berry. The magical kind. Too stunned to refuse, me. I take and eat it, looking like a drooling idiot. Or, not just looking. She smiles and walks away. Kairos is a few steps behind. It looks back before it leaves, the hummingbird still on its shoulder. It nods at me, acknowledging. We will meet again soon, it says. I cannot name exactly at what moment I make the decision to partake in the tourney. But I did, and won. Because I had something the others did not. They were fighting for glory, honor. Ideals bestowed upon them by others. I had a motivation deeper than anything they had probably ever felt. Needed to be with them again, me. For the rest of my life."

Her crying had ceased, and although she was still trembling, her voice steadied. 

"Only, nating fo sempere." The assassin smiled, and Lazuli had never seen anything so bittersweet. "I keep telling myself it was the end that it wanted. Protecting its king and people until its last moment. A krownmang's death. It helps, sometimes." 

Tearing her gaze from Kairos' body, Qen looked up to the glass ceiling of their quarters. The skies were clear, and the stars shone brightly. Her next sentence was barely more than a whisper in the night.

"Oyedeng, beratna. If life transcends death, then I will look for you there. If not, then there too. We will meet again." 

What I had left here

I just held it tight

So someone with your eyes

Might come in time

To hold me like water

Or Christ, hold me like a knife

We're born at night

So much of our lives

Is just carving through the dark

To get so far

And the hardest part

Is who we are

It's who we are