Heir of Beasts

Ch. 1.2- Veritas

It's a balmy summer night. The air is filled with the scent of Belleroyal bushes that have just opened their vibrant red buds, courting the attention of one specific moth. The light is golden-hued, casting a warm glow over everything. I sit on a stone bench in the gardens, surrounded by flora, drinking in the calm of twilight. The bassom trees sway above me, rustled by a gentle night wind, and the leaves of the turtleroses brush against my leg like a pet.

I came out here after I fought with the Ambassador. I considered going back to my room, or to my office, but the entirety of the manor seemed too confining. I could feel the weight of the great house pressing down on me, making it hard for me to breathe. Somehow out here, without windows or doors or walls, I feel I can breathe freely. Out here, it's easier to convince myself that everything will be okay.

I sit for I don't know how long, half my mind focusing on the flowers growing in front of me, half of it an ocean away in Shikkah, seeking out a lost girl. I feel her absence acutely in moments like this, when it's just me and nature and silence. I can almost picture her sitting beside me on the bench. She would reach over and take my hand in hers and squeeze it, the way she did to let me know she was there, she was with me.

If only the wind could carry me across the ocean with it, I think, plucking petals from a veritas flower. They flutter away from me in the breeze, carried off to goddess knows where, little white specs wafting upwards over the garden wall. If only I had an army. If only the world wasn't what it was.

An image suddenly comes into my head, so clear it seems real for a moment. I'm sitting on the same bench, thirty years from now. I imagine lines creasing in the corners of my eyes and around my lips, where I forgot to smile. I see streaks of white winding through my silvery hair, and an aged sallowness replacing the rose of my complexion.

In my vision I've never left the garden. I've spent years there, so long that the grass has grown up over my feet and tendrils of ivy encircle my legs. Moss has grown over half my face; I've been so still for so long. I might as well be a stone. I've been waiting for, for something, I don't know what. For the world to be fair again. For O'otani to come down the path towards me. For my mother to appear and take my hand and lead me home. But no one has come, and I've stagnated in the garden, a forgotten statue locked in the same dead pose.

Is that my future? I wonder. Sitting still, reliving the past over and over and over again because I can't make so much as a dent in the future? Passed over by time, inconsequential, doomed to an eternity of waiting for love to come back? Of waiting to hear footsteps that will never come?

A real set of footsteps comes up the garden path, interrupting my morbid thoughts. I lift my head, expecting to see Avamir or Tyro, but instead a great dark woman stands in front of me. Her hair is down, shifting and whispering in the soft night wind. Her eyes are small and sharp and piercing black, and for a moment their intensity frightens me.

"Hello, Grand Councilor Nara," I stammer out, sitting up straighter and brushing my long hair back from my face.

I wait for her to answer, to return the greeting, but she doesn't. She just stares at me with the same hawkish, intense gaze, her eyes locked unwaveringly on my face. I shift in my seat, uncomfortable under her scrutiny.

"Do you want something from me, Grand Councilor?" I prompt when her silence grows too large to ignore. My voice seems to break her strange concentration: she blinks, her eyes mellowing into something close to calm, and speaks with a clear voice.

"No, Somitu's son. I don't need anything from you. I only came here to walk in the gardens; I didn't expect to find you here at all."

"Oh," I say, still a bit ruffled from her soul-searching stare. "Well, I'm sorry to have disturbed you, I was just heading back inside anyways-" I start to get up, trying to make a speedy exit before she takes any more notice of me.