Nobody make a move, everybody on the ground!
Let me see your hands, bring the f*cking cameras out
The Isles.
It had been his place, his seat, his home for well over four years before time was so rudely manipulated and swept them away. Now, now he found himself returning to a place half-forgotten, where one could expect to meet one's demons just around the next bend in the path. The swamp too, seemed to have changed, pale with frost and the ground under-hoof just as treacherous. The shades were gone, burned away like the memories of the former queen, but still, he was not comfortable.
He , in all likelihood, was probably barely sane.
So why did he linger? The answer lay in his own mind; a gently blooming smile, a silken mane, an invisible tease, all these and a thousand's thousand more. But time had changed them, and none suffered the haunting chasm between rage and loss quite so well as one torn between.
It wasn't like she had left him for another, no, that he might have dealt with, but only after spending his rage in coins of blood and pain upon the other's hide. It wasn't even as if she had told him enough, and had shut her love away. No, she had simply forgotten. And he, he the veteran of many battles, the sire of brilliant sons and a few cunning daughters, he was too scared to ask her what had happened.
He didn't want to see her. He needed to see her. He couldn't.
It was enough for now, to push himself to the brink of exhaustion and beyond, relearning the territory, lighting the marsh gas a-flame once more (the eerie witchlight casting green upon the gold hide), to push away all the physical demons he could handle, and avoid his own.
It wasn't too long before he found himself at their cove, that rocky inlet where they had spent afternoons swimming or playing chase like they were both undignified youths. They haunted him, lingering like one of Dresden's ghosts, and he could almost hear the echo of her laughter.
What use was a king without his queen?
zacharias
batwinged king of the isles |
