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king solomon (1617) {40}
there was gentle wind and salt in the air, heavy and blissful in the humid summer as the sun swirled across the skies and the foaming waters like a melting star
the tang of the long-lost empire turned to honey-dew ashes falling off cigarettes held by skinny fingers licking at the edges of a northern precipice
the heavens over copenhagen have never been kinder over the knife solomon thrust into a child's throat for an empire stretching north bleeds glory, not blood
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In the fizzling empires of Europe, where princes brought courts to their knees and queens reigned like marbled statues carved from the very palaces they raised on the streets of their great capitals, Peter fell in love again.
And it felt like someone cracked open the lid of his coffin, where grave-like air suffocated him as he twisted and turned, with only Isabella's hollow corpse to hear his screaming, and air, sweet like cherry blossom in the summer, rushed to fill the fibers of his soul.
Peter knew that it was her who'd poured life's sweet poison back into him.
Helena.
They called him the prince of painters and the painter of princes, but he'd only ever wanted to paint her.
He still remembered how they'd met. Every moment of that divine night still imprinted in the beating of his heart.
"I believe if the moon was only half as beautiful as you are, the painters would have long crumbled in their poor attempts to put it on canvas," he told her, sweet garden air playing with the hairs under his hat, stars shining in his eyes as he drank her in.
Peter thought she would blush, cheeks flooding with tints of cadmium red, but her skin simply caught that divine moonlight like seashell luster, lips like rose buds pulling at the corners until his head was spinning like he'd had too much wine, and he was the one blushing.
"But you," she whispered, hands sliding across the white marble railing of the balcony swallowed by lush green vines weaving through the cracks of history, "You wouldn't be afraid to paint me, would you?"
