Castles in the Sky

Pearl

Warning: Threat to life of main character, brief descriptions of injury.

A/N: Please make sure to read chapter 16, published earlier today, first!

~~

No eagerly-awaited letter in reply.

Solaris's own inked words prophetic as he drifted rudderless in that grey, lost limbo's land, linked between the arms of men and ghosts as feet straddled the divide from one world to the next.

Gruesome gallons of blood lost, soaking layers of clothes and underclothes - and that treasured little keepsake of Busaba's best lace that lived folded in chest's pocket each day.

Dove's white succumbed to crimson's clutches. Everything spoilt, everything lost?

"He will not survive this", the eldest general, father's friend, announced dryly - flat and factual, lips in grim line. "But Galea must not know. I propose we send a decoy King with milder injury to another regiment to feign recuperation. Lord Orion fights on as leader here, until all is settled at last"

Nods and "ayes" from weary figures of the emergency war council around:

"Tell no one"

//

In the first days Dr Phawattakun himself, too, feared the worst - nursing a weakening body, as blood drained, as muscles failed, as eyes fluttered, as lips dried...as pulse faded.

A dying body. Weakening just the natural, painful process of it all.

Skin pale, waxy, as if the very colours were seeping from Mew's world one by one.

Orion brought Ciel's letter and painting to his sibling's side. Red-rimmed eyes, nostrils flaring as he fought to stay within his seams.

"Here brother, your wife is with you now"

And just as the few that knew prepared to send the mighty Solaris on tide's rickety rowing boat across to the other side, something happened.

Or rather, didn't.

As days turned to weeks, the King simply didn't die.

"It's as if he's being held here by some thread that won't break, refuses to snap, won't let go", the chief physician observed - a time only for bare-hearted belief, when medicine has done all that it can - "I just wonder..."

//

Mew was wandering, desolate, in sea's fog. The sort of densely disorientating mists in which if a man were to stretch out an arm he couldn't count his own fingers.

Claggy, wet sands sucking the nomad in with every step, stride dragging heavier, tireder.

Which way back to terra firma? Head seeking blindly this way and that, deadened and deafened by the disembodied roar of the sea, screeches of unseen gulls, phantom-like spectres' shadows swooping the swirling mists above.

He stumbled on, growing cold, growing old. Until, with breath's sharp intake, he felt those icy waters bite - understanding with breaking heart, that the sea had reached him, or he had reached the sea.

Bell's toll.

Hypnotic, hungry waves lapping about his toes, his feet, his ankles, as he numbed to the chill, to everything. His feeling - all of his feelings were leaving him. The gelatinous suction of saturated, sodden sands swallowing him deeper, as carnivorous ripples lulled him into their swell to be disarmed, digested.

Soul spat out and floating into wispy nothingness on a sea's sigh.

Nothing.

But...held back.