I knew he wasn’t for me. I knew the blood in our veins would pull us apart. I never wanted to hope. I never wanted it. I know who I am, I know what I want. It has nothing to do with him.
But even without hope, something grew between us. I admit it. I admit he hurt me.
He doesn’t deserve to stand by my side. He doesn’t deserve my forgiveness.
He deserves my wrath.
Dalca raises a flaming torch. The flames catch on the wetness waiting to fall from his eyes. He holds it over the pyre, but he doesn’t let itfall. As though he can’t bear to say goodbye. In the firelight lines of gold glint on his fingers, lines that stop at his elbows, incomplete. His transformation to Regia has begun.
A glow grows within the crowds. In a show of solidarity, the people of the city hold paper orbs inked with a pair of ikons. As they’re activated, the orbs glow with light. One for each soul bearing witness.
The light spreads like ripples of water. It swells from the first ring outward, the second aglow, the third less so, the fourth with only smatterings of gold. The fifth is dark. My heart clenches. Has the Storm devoured my home ring?
Dalca looks every bit the prince, lit from below by the soft light of a thousand paper lights. And yet I’ve never seen him look so fragile.
The night was still before, but now it’s as though time has stopped. Even the wind quiets its whispers.
All I hear is the crackling of the fire in the torch. But it too is muted. Tender, gentle, like the night around us.
Dalca lowers the torch to the pyre. His arm shakes, just once, and then his tears fall.
The pyre catches alight instantly, fire augmented by ikons. In seconds, the fire stretches tall into the sky. The smoke stretches taller still. Shapes form in the flames, painted in hues of red and blood-orange. They turn into people; a smiling man and woman holding a baby. The Regia’s first moments. The flames play out the story of her life. They show her childhood, full of laughter. She grows into a studious, imperious young woman. She meets the man she will love. And then her child is born.
Dalca stands alone as his mother’s life plays out. The fire paints his skin, reflecting on the darks of his eyes and the tear tracks lining his cheeks.
It hurts to look at him. Doesn’t he deserve this? Shouldn’t he suffer? Don’t I hate him?
A wash of pale gold shields him from view. The paper orbs, released all at once. A show of light against the total dark of the Storm.
The sky is alight with little suns. It feels overwhelming. It feels holy.
I catch glimpses of Dalca through gaps in the flow of lanterns. His face is tilted toward the sky.
The paper lights rise through the ikonshield, each one blotted out when it meets the Storm.
Darkness falls like a curtain on this not-dream, this vision from the present. The Great Queen whisks me onward.
Something glimmers in the blackness.
In a starless sky, two primordial forces orbit each other, a being like a hundred thousand sparks and another like every hint of darkness. They dance in perfect balance, hanging in this ancient place, pushing and pulling, fear and love, fire and water, air and earth, order and change. They shape bodies for themselves, godly ones, genderless and invulnerable. Equal and opposite. The Great King and the Great Queen.
They do things fearsome and magnificent. The King creates things of structure, walls and kingdoms, words and numbers. A language of power, a precursor to the ikons. The Queen creates things wild and natural, imprecise and beautiful, the dewdrop on a flower and the rot in its roots, planting within people both curiosity and wonder.
The dream draws me through time. They always rule together, the King and the Queen, through human avatars. Sometimes the rulers are siblings, sometimes strangers who grow close, sometimes lovers. Sometimes both men, sometimes women. Sometimes they fight, waging war upon each other until a new balance is found.
The King and Queen choose from among the people, finding those best capable of serving them, bestowing upon them marks of power, ones their vessels must choose to accept. The Great King bestows upon his vessel a mark that appears on the skin, one that gleams like gold and glows with softest light. The Great Queen bestows something else: a mark that lies inside, unseen, but for when it sometimes appears on the skin as if rising from within, in a dancing pattern of ever-changing lines. Hers is not gold but darkly iridescent, like oil over black water.
Those human servants are nothing like the Regia. They retain their minds. They work together with the King and Queen, their aides, not their slaves.
And then the dream takes me to the chasm that happened near three hundred years ago. The Regia Dalcanin fights and kills his brother, and the Queen is set loose. The King intends to leave Dalcanin’s body, but cannot. Dalcanin has tattooed over the mark, adding to it, binding the King to him. The Queen bestows her mark upon another, but Dalcanin kills her vessel, and the two others who come after.
Dalcanin, the first Regia of the modern kind, cements his power. His descendants will bind the Great King to themselves, generation after generation.
The Great Queen flees. A simple, ordinary storm had come to thunder and rain upon the city, and she finds refuge in it. It occurs to her that a storm is something that cannot be killed.
She feeds it her power like she once gave power to her vessel, and the storm grows strange, still, undying. She feeds it her anger, her loneliness, her longing.
There is a darkening.