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There was a strange velio man standing at the edge of his vision.
Kip, sitting on the rocks with his feet dangling in the gentle wash of waves breaking over the shore, could not help but think this the epitome of bad manners. Couldn’t the man see he was having a private sulk?
Unfathomably, the man only tilted his head and took a hesitant step closer. He was draped in rich, flowy robes of bright yellow and pure white and fairly clinked with a veritable dragon’s hoard of bracelets, rings and other pieces, some sewn into his clothes and some shining against his black skin. If Kip hadn’t been in such a stormy mood, he might have stared at the sheer opulence of it all.
But, “Kip?” the man asked, quietly, and suddenly Kip’s storm was replaced by an icy blast of terror.
Being sent away to Buru Tovo was bad enough. Surely his mother hadn’t changed her mind. Surely? But why else would the Shaian stranger know his name, if not because Kip had finally been inconvenient and troublesome enough that he was being sent not even to another island, but away from the Vangavaye-ve entirely?
“Oh,” the man said, startled and dismayed by the wide-eyed look of mute terror Kip had turned on him, and was suddenly a boy.
Still in fancy velio clothes, still black-skinned and shaved entirely bald, but only a boy, about Kip’s age but narrower and softer. “There,” he said, his voice higher but just as melodious as the man’s had been. “Is that better? I didn’t mean to frighten you.” He eyed Kip curiously, and Kip noticed that his eyes were actually golden, not just reflecting the low sun. “You look very young,” he marveled, sounding almost delighted at this.
This was really too much. Indignance swept away the terror, and Kip stood up and straightened to his full height – somewhat less impressive than he had hoped, for it turned out that the other boy was half a head taller than him, but at least Kip was brawnier and would surely win in a fair fight. He stared loftily at the other boy and declared, “I am eleven.”
He could have sworn there was a brief flicker of mirth in the stranger’s strange eyes, but it was quickly smothered, and the other boy’s voice was perfectly grave and solemn enough to soothe Kip’s ruffled feathers as he said, “That is a good age.” He paused, frowning a little. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”
Bewildered, Kip looked at the stranger from head to toe again before shaking his head. Why should he? There were velioi in the city, but none like this one.
“Ah,” the boy said. “I am… your friend.” He pronounced the words slowly and carefully, as though they were oddly shaped and unfamiliar on his tongue, but also like they were something rare and valuable and perhaps a little fragile. “And I’m here to find you and help you. You’re dreaming, Kip.”
Kip stared. “No, I’m not. Is this a joke? Did Quintus put you up to this?”
“Alas, no.There was… an attack, an attempt on… your life.” These words were spoken like they were something sharp and spiky he had to spit out. Kip stepped back from the words, from the vehemence of them, from the absurd, terrifying thought that someone would – would – try to harm him, really harm him.
He had forgotten about his sprained ankle, and he hissed and crouched to rub at it when the involuntary step reminded him.
The other boy’s sundrop cowrie eyes went sharp and hard at that. “You’re injured. What has happened?”
Kip flushed, embarrassed. “It’s just sprained,” he muttered, but then he saw that the boy’s eyes had also caught the scrapes on his right arm and the purplish bruise on the right corner of his jaw, which had both been revealed when he had turned to see to his ankle. He scowled defiantly. “Hillen said… he said things about my father. That he must have read the winds and currents wrong.” That this was why he had drowned, but he would not repeat that aloud.
It was disconcerting, being stared at by the golden eyes. “You got into a fistfight with your cousin? You?”
He sounded awed, incredulous. Not at all angry, somehow. Everyone else had been so angry.
Kip glared at him even so, just in case. “He deserved it,” he snapped, before this morning’s news washed over him again and he remembered why he had stalked this far from the city proper to sulk. “But Mama says it’s too much, that she’s sending me to Loaloa because she can’t have me getting into fights and… stuff, anymore. That I’m too much, right now.”
He paused. The weather had turned, the pale blue sky now roiling with clouds as dark as his bruise, the wind picking up speed and whipping the waves into a frenzy.
“Kip?” The other boy sounded worried.
Kip looked at him blindly. “Why am I always too much?”
Golden eyes blinked, startled and upset, blinked away the – the spray of the ocean, surely, not tears – but before the boy could speak, Cliopher was alone in his room in Astandalas, feeling sorry for himself because he had not been invited to a Silverheart party, and on some level aware that this was the night the lights would go out.
“Kip.”
He turned, astonished and shocked beyond belief to see the person who had stepped through the door into his room, and banged his knee on the floor in his rush to throw himself into a full formal obeisance in front of the Glorious One, the Lord of the Rising Stars.
He hadn’t even knocked, Cliopher thought deliriously, and then had to resist the urge to giggle into the floor at the idea that the Emperor of Astandalas needed to knock at any door in all the worlds.
“Kip. Please. You may…” The deep voice was rough with upset, clearly discomfited, and Cliopher could not believe he had so mangled the formal obeisance as to make the Glorious and Radiant One this uncomfortable. He could see, just barely, his Emperor’s fingers moving, but had no idea what the gesture might mean, and only dared to rise when the Glorious One finally managed, in a strangled voice, “You may rise.”
He did, and promptly had no idea what to do next. What did one do when one’s Emperor unexpectedly paid a visit? Offer him coffee? Ask him to sit down?
I only have one chair, he realized in sudden panic. He could not offer the chair to his lord – it was hard and straight-backed and not at all comfortable, but – he had to suppress a frantic grin – it was not like he could ask the Lord of the Rising Stars to sit on his bed, either!
Said Lord of the Rising Stars was eyeing him, with a look that in any other man Cliopher might have described as nervous. “Well then,” he said, his voice low and carefully neutral. “Do you remember what we just talked about?”
Cliopher’s mind drew a perfect, terrifying blank, and he was almost on his knees again before the Emperor’s impatient gesture urged him to get back to his feet and stay that way. “My lord,” he managed, voice hoarse with blind panic, “I do not believe I have ever had the honor to exchange a word with your,” panic panic panic, “Gloriousness?”
He wanted to groan. How did one address the lord of five worlds when the lord appeared, uninvited and unexpected and – oh no – unaccompanied – in the middle of a perfectly good sulk?
(He was immediately and acutely worried that the Emperor, inexplicably devoid of his guards, would somehow injure himself in Cliopher’s rooms – prick his finger on something and catch his death in some bewildering infection, perhaps. What was he thinking, moving around without his guards?)
The Emperor looked briefly disappointed and worried, but the expression was gone in a blink and was replaced by the impenetrable benevolent calm Cliopher knew so well from his state portraits.
“Ah,” he said. “I see I have to begin anew. Cliopher, you are trapped in a continuous state of dreaming. The healers have done what they can, but you will not wake up, and we suspect that something of magical nature is afoot. I am here to help you.”
Cliopher stared, what little etiquette he knew dissipating in the face of this frankly absurd statement.
The Glorious One eyed him carefully. “You look so young, and the air tastes of Astandalas. I suspect it would not yet make any sense to you if I said, you can imagine why I felt it best to undertake investigating this myself rather than asking my priest-wizards to do it.”
Indeed it did not. Cliopher blinked, bewildered and at a loss for words.
The lion eyes were sorrowful, their soft golden glow enough to make Cliopher suddenly realize, with a start, that the Emperor should have been radiant, should have glowed bright enough to light his small rooms, should have blinded him the moment he had looked his lord in the eyes.
But just then the lights flickered and went out, just then the world ended, and Kip stumbled head over heels over the outrigger of his vaha and went crashing into the roaring waves.
For an interminable moment he was suspended between the depths and the skies, between one breath and next, between life and death, up and down, sanity and madness.
Then the storm spat him out on a sandy beach, and he scrambled, hands clawing in the wet sand for purchase when the hungry sea tried to suck him back, and where there should have been a rock to grab there was hand grasping his.
There was a moment of shock and held breath, a moment where the hand felt searing against his chilled skin, a moment where the jolt of the abrupt contact seemed to shake Kip to his bones.
“Oh,” a deep voice said, breathlessly, and then, determined, “Come now!”
The hand pulled and Kip went, obedient and too weary to fight, and at length he was sprawled on the beach out of the reach of the grasping waves crashing ashore. There was an unfamiliar man beside him, flopped on his back in an undignified heap with his fine clothes all over in wet sand, breathing heavily and squinting up against the torrential rain.
“Well!” the man gasped. “That was unpleasant! I can’t remember the last time I have been soaked to the skin…” He lifted a soggy piece of his ludicrously glorious robe, raised an eyebrow at it, and let it flop back down. He turned to look at Kip, his eyes luminous in the gloom.
Oh, just to be looked at by another person!
A lightning split the sky, and Kip's breath caught. A deep roll of thunder followed almost immediately.
"I don't," he tried, his voice hoarse from… screaming? Disuse? He didn't even know, anymore, and had no idea what he had been about to say, anyway. He had been alone for so long, the months and years and centuries of his long voyage all blurring into each other, and had not seen another soul since Saya Ng had gone overboard. He stared hungrily at the man, drinking in the rise and fall of his chest, the sand clinging to his black skin, his face – his expression going from questioning to bemused to flustered the longer Kip stared.
No matter how imperfectly perfect he seemed, he couldn’t be real. Why would there be a Shaian man in clothes more at home at the Emperor’s court, here on this forsaken atoll or island in the middle of the Wide Seas? No. He had been alone so long, longing for companionship for so long, that his mind was playing tricks on him.
He very carefully did not examine why the man looked familiar; he was fairly sure that once dry and clean, the man’s robes would be in colors and of a cut used by only one person in Zunidh. It was one thing to dream of entering the service of the Glorious One, and quite something else to dream of that same Glorious One rescuing him from the sea.
The man who was most certainly not the Glorious One sighed and struggled for a moment with his wet robes to sit up. Kip sat up as well, eyes still on him; ghost or dream or not, he would drink in his fill of the sight of another person.
“Again, then?” the man asked, with an attempt at a light tone completely at odds with the weariness and strain betrayed by his eyes. They were the color of fire coral. “Very well. Kip, I’m here to help you—”
“I’m dreaming,” Kip marveled, barely aware that he had interrupted the other man. “You’d think I’d dream of nicer weather.”
The man paused, startled. “Yes – yes, you’re dreaming,” he said, suddenly excited. “Do you remember what I told you before?”
“Or mad,” Kip continued thoughtfully. He felt eerily certain that he should have been shaking and weeping with exhaustion, with yet another shipwreck, with getting spun out of direction once again; the dreamlike calm felt, almost, more dangerous than breaking down, like lethargy sapping his strength. “I suppose it’s no wonder if I’ve finally cracked. No, I don’t remember ever speaking with you, but if you give me a bit of time I’m sure I’ll convince myself that you’ve been traveling with me all this time and start remembering all kinds of conversations.”
And really, was going mad truly such a bad thing, if it gave him someone to talk with?
Emotions flashed across the other man’s face like lightning: surprise, dismay, despair and determination in quick succession. “Not mad,” he insisted, almost vehemently. “No, Kip, you’re having a nightmare. I’m here to find you, not part of it.” He paused, uncertainly. “I hope.”
There was a smile tugging at Kip’s lips, unfamiliar and almost painful. His face had been frozen into a grimace for what felt like decades. “Do I get to name you?” he asked, and the fire coral eyes widened.
He could not help it, at that wide-eyed expression, like the sun breaking through clouds and yet so absurdly human, vulnerable. He reached out, stopping just shy of touching the man’s face, just in case. For what would he do if the phantom dissipated at his touch?
He didn’t get to find out, because the phantom jerked back from him as though Kip had raised a fist instead of reaching out curious fingertips, and ended up sprawled on his backside, looking embarrassed by his reaction. “My apologies,” he murmured over the still roaring storm. “I didn’t think. I already reached out instinctively to pull you ashore, didn’t I? I suppose the taboos are not in effect here.”
And the phantom reached back.
But instead of his skin, Kip’s fingers found broken pieces of obsidian on the bay-side flank of Mama Ituri. He tried very hard to not weep over them, over finding such a perfect piece only to break it when he was almost back to the beach, and ignored the silent figure – surely the shadow of some strange god or unfamiliar ancestor – standing watching him in the corner of his eye.
So it went.
At lunch, in one of the Palace cafeterias he frequented, where – as everywhere else – he was left to sit alone in a widening circle of empty tables, his Radiancy walked in, took a seat across from him, and said something about dreams that Cliopher could not process at all because of the impossibility of his Radiancy in a cafeteria.
Cliopher opened his mouth to ask for his lord to clarify, and was on the streets of Astandalas the Golden, tired and discouraged and considering if he had the energy to turn and correct a merchant he had just overheard saying that something was “as far away as Vonyabi”. A strange nobleman stopped by Kip, frowned and said, “I can’t believe we used to call it that,” and then, “Come along, Kip,” so familiarly that Kip had already taken several steps before he stopped to wonder.
He had to lean against a wall for support, suddenly weak and woozy and angry at himself for being huddled at the wall in full court. He was already feeling miserable even without Conju standing in front of him berating him for making an appearance here instead of resting when he was so clearly ill, that he could not afford to show weakness this soon after the Littleridge negotiations had concluded. He felt even worse when his Radiancy unexpectedly emerged from the crowd to agree.
“Conju is right,” the Lord of Zunidh said severely. “When is this? You look very ill,” and Cliopher had to capitulate, not only because his lord was ordering him to rest but also because he was clearly not in his right mind if he was seeing his lord both standing before him and yet still seated on his throne on the other side of the room.
“Very well, my lord,” he murmured, and looked sullenly down at his mug of mead. It was good, annoyingly good, and Sara was irritatingly lovely, and the stupid inn was so charming, and he was frustrated and angry at Basil for wanting to stay there, all in the middle of their grand adventure.
“Grand adventure?” someone interrupted his private mutterings, turning a chair to sit backwards on it across the table, leaning his elbows on the back of the chair and his chin on his hands. “Yes, I’m beginning to see that you have had much more of those than I previously knew.” The man, clad in sky-blue and scarlet and with a harp slung across his back, grinned at him, weary but pleased. “Finally we are back in a place and time where I am not so constrained by your expectations. Perhaps a place and time where you are not too overawed or… overcome… to listen?”
Kip stared. “Who are you?” he asked, affronted.
“Your friend,” the man said casually. It had an air of forced carelessness, like he had been practicing these words a lot to get it just right, with just the correct amount of nonchalance. “Kip, you are not really sitting in an inn on the border between Alinor and Ysthar. You are under a spell, trapped in your dreams, and I’m trying to help you find your way home.”
Kip narrowed his eyes. “I’m not going home yet, whoever you are. My journey has only just begun, and I’ll walk the rest of it alone if I have to.” He shot a scowl at Basil, even now leaning on the bar to chatter excitedly with the innkeeper’s daughter, who was laughing merrily at whatever he had just said.
He could not begrudge his cousin for falling in love. Indeed, he was happy for Basil, or at least wanted to be. But why did this keep happening? Why did people always have to go and find others to love more than him?
The stranger visibly stopped a sigh, but could not completely hide his frustration. “I wish you would stop at one dream for long enough to hear me out,” he said, and Kip rolled his eyes at the mad blatherings of a traveling bard. “Do you ever stop for a moment?”
Kip looked up and could not see the surface.
“Is this where you stop?” his great-uncle has asked him, and Kip had decided that this was not where he stopped, and now he was going to drown here in the cold, the steady press of the deep current pushing him against the rock, slowly compressing his lungs, and he had not even found the flame pearl he had dived for.
Why did he always have to be too much and yet far too little when it really came down to it?
A shadow emerged from the depths, and he nearly screamed what little remained of his oxygen, a few bubbles emerging in the brief moment of horror when he thought that some sea monster had come to claim him. But the shadow solidified into a young man, so black of skin he barely stood out from the darkness, only his eyes glowing in the dark and his pale clothes floating eerily around him in great loose waves. He was untouched by the current, unbothered by the darkness or the depths or the lack of air, and Kip thought deliriously of the tales of sirens and merfolk and almost resisted when the young man grasped him around his chest and effortlessly pulled him up towards where the sun was glinting off the waves.
They staggered, buffeted by the waves pushing them ashore, when they finally got far enough that they could stand with their heads above the water, Kip because the siren supporting him turned out to be a lot taller than him, and the siren perhaps because he was not used to having feet. Gulping in big breaths of precious air, shaking despite now walking in these shallow waters, these safe playgrounds of his days in his great-uncle’s care, Kip turned his gaze on the siren.
“Who are you?” he gasped, his voice raspy and threadbare.
The siren glanced at him and smiled faintly, his eyes just as glowy in daylight as they had been in the depths. “No,” he said, softly. “I’m too weary to begin over, just now. I’ll explain later.”
Kip nodded, understanding, for he could feel that same weariness settling over his own bones, and turned back to his studies.
The damn etiquette books were mocking him.
He had taken refuge in Saya Dorn’s house, which was by now the only place where he could study for the entrance exams without drawing the mockery of his friends and family.
Not that anyone mocked him, now, not while his family was in mourning. But they all wondered how he could still care about them, still even consider leaving, after…
But Navalia had said. It had been one of the very last things she had said to him, to follow his path and to pay no heed to anyone who couldn’t understand it. He had to – he had been ready to give up, before, but he could not – not now, when it was what she had wanted, when it was what he had wanted for so long, what only Navalia had supported.
But it was hard to find the will to study, with her gone.
He had borrowed the little portrait from Saya Dorn’s shrine, set it on the table across from him in the faint hope that he would once more hear that distant call, feel the tug of that new star path.
There was no call, but there was a quiet sound, an aborted gasp.
Kip turned, and there he was, the portrait come to life in the middle of Saya Dorn’s kitchen.
The hundredth Emperor of Astanalas, resplendent and bejeweled and stunned and dismayed and with his eyes entirely golden, just like in the painting and, impossibly, here.
Absurdly, some part of Kip thought he looked too young, even though he was certainly older than Kip.
“I didn’t”, the inexplicable Emperor whispered, “I didn’t realize. You never… I didn’t think your family followed the… imperial cult.”
“We don’t,” Kip replied, dumbly. “It’s not mine.” Even with the strange, flat eyes, entirely golden, he looked so shocked and shaken that Kip could not think of anything to say except, “Would you like to sit down? There’s mango juice, if you’d like?”
The Emperor – Artorin Damara – laughed shakily. “Only you – yes, I might as well. Thank you.” And he took a seat on the high stool on the other side of the kitchen island, folded his hands and his sumptuous sleeves on the tabletop and stared, gold-leaf eyes blank, at Kip’s books.
He could not be here, of course. He had to be a dream, a practice dummy Kip’s overwrought mind had conjured from his dread of the etiquette portion of the exams, but he looked so upset that Kip found himself responding not with Astandalan courtesy but with much older rules of hospitality. This was not his house, but it was his homeland, and dream or not, Artorin Damara was far from his.
He poured a glass of juice and pushed it towards the young Emperor, who took it and sipped on the juice absently for a moment.
At length, Artorin Damara asked, very quietly, “Not yours?”
“No,” Kip confirmed, not sure why this was such an important point but willing to indulge him. “I thought it might motivate me to study, so I borrowed Saya Dorn’s.”
“Study,” Emperor Artorin repeated softly. He blinked and his expression sharpened, even if his odd flat eyes could not exactly focus on the books. “To enter the service. Yes, I know this. How many times is it, now?”
Kip flushed. Even for a ghost conjured by his dreams, he did not relish the Emperor knowing of his many failed attempts. “It’s my fifth time sitting the exams,” he said stiffly, and finally realized that he had failed to address the Emperor with any sort of title or honorific at any point of this conversation.
Realized also that Artorin Damara did not seem to care.
He was looking at Kip with those inscrutable gold-leaf eyes, his lips betraying a small twist of sorrow where the eyes couldn’t. “Your fifth and final attempt. Then one only your sister believed in, in the end.”
Kip’s heart was suddenly in his throat, Navalia’s death still a fresh wound, not quite festering but far from a clean cut. “How did you know?” he whispered.
“Because I’m your friend,” Artorin Damara said, exasperated and fond and like these words had once been odd on his tongue and had become familiar and beloved through repetition, through being whispered in crowds, shouted over storms, said hesitantly and said defiantly and said over and over until they landed right where Kip’s soul had somehow known to expect them, where there was a slot just for them.
He did not know how they could be true, but the truth of them rang in the vaults of his heart, high and joyous and resonant, reverberated through his bones, and he could not but believe them.
But the beginnings of his smile were halted by the expression of weary despair on the Emperor’s face. “You keep forgetting me,” he whispered, “and I keep starting over, and I’m trying so very hard to help you, but I don’t know how, and we are running out of time. The healers say you’re fading, that you can’t survive much longer without food and water, and that they dare not attempt keeping you under magical stasis because of the spell already on you, and I don’t know how to disentangle it. The lord magus of Zunidh, and I don’t know how to disenchant you.” He rubbed a hand across his face, a gesture so human and so far removed from what the books led one to expect of the Glorious One that it squeezed Kip’s heart. “I keep chasing you across your dreams and nightmares and – I really should not be seeing any of this, I would have never resorted to this sort of invasion of your privacy and innermost thoughts had I thought there was any other way, and if we ever get out of this I promise I will apologize profusely—”
He paused to draw breath, and Kip, alarmed, reached out and took one of his outstretched hands. The hand jerked in his and the Emperor went perfectly still.
The golden eyes were like polished mirrors, reflecting the world without showing anything from within, and for the first time Kip wondered if Artorin Damara felt trapped behind that mirror surface, barely able to look out and with no one to look in.
Kip said, slowly, “You’re my friend.”
Artorin Damara managed a wan smile. “Yes,” he said, turning his hand to grip Kip’s in turn. “Yes.”
“I’m dreaming. Trapped in my dreams,” Kip confirmed, and he nodded. “And somewhere in the waking world, my friend is doing everything he can to free me.”
The gold-leaf eyes squeezed shut over a brilliant shine that could not possibly be tears. “Everything, my dear Kip.”
The hundredth Emperor of Astandalas called him Kip.
A friendship so deep that one would follow the other to the stars… or into the twisting, twining realm of dreams.
“That’s all I ever wanted,” he said, his heart aching at the thought that it seemed he had gotten his wish, only for it to cause such pain for his dearest friend. “Oh, I’m so sorry. You say you keep chasing me from dream to dream, and having to start over. I wish I could stop for you, that I knew how to not be so much.”
Again, the hand in his jerked, and this time the Emperor – Artorin Damara – no, just Artorin – no, not even that, but Kip did not have any other name to call him, yet – sat up straight, staring at him.
“Of course,” he murmured, as if to himself. “It’s a clear pattern, how did I miss it before? All these dreams have been about moments when you’ve felt lost, adrift, alone, or like you’ve failed. When you've been made to feel that you're too much or too little of something. That’s what’s keeping you under, the despair and the loss of direction and the…"
He didn't say the feeling that you're not wanted out loud, but he didn't have to. Kip was clearly younger than the one this Artorin knew, but he knew.
Artorin fell silent for a moment, his hand still in Kip’s. Then he closed his strange gold-leaf eyes and took a deep breath.
When he opened them, the gold-leaf was gone.
His pupils were blown, and around them, like a ring of fire, or like the sun coming out after a solar eclipse, his irises were a molten amber glowing bright with rising magic. His magic crackled and sparkled in the air between them, caught Artorin’s robes and Kip’s plain tunic and the pages of Kip’s books and notes, and for a moment everything seemed suspended mid-air.
Then he said, “Will you let me guide your dreams for a moment?” and Kip knew that this was not only an emperor he had deemed worth staying for, but an emperor worth following to the ends of the world.
And to the stars?
Perhaps, he thought.
He squeezed the hand in his and nodded.
They walked in dreams Kip had never dared to imagine. Well – dreams he had, in truth, imagined, but never considered plausible. With Artorin’s hand in his, he could move from dream to dream without starting over, not that he wished to let go either way.
“This was your doing,” Artorin told Kip, as they stood in front of a beautiful building in Csiven. Kip looked at the people walking in, defeated and tired, and looked at them walking out, taken care of and with a purpose, and he remembered the Indrogan Estates.
“This, too, is all you,” his Radiancy said, sitting beside him in the front row of a concert organized by a group of youths in Boloyo City, all from different backgrounds, and Cliopher remembered the stipend.
There was the sea train, hurtling across moonlit waves under an arc of falling viau. There was a skyship, approaching Gorjo City at dawn. There were murals in bright colors, climbing the sides of high buildings in Zangoraville. There were gardens and woodcarver’s shops and art programs and cheese stalls set up by people who could not have dreamed of doing so before. There were youngsters laughing as they picked up their books for the entrance exams to the service, all over the world. There were long, dark halls full of supplies, full of clean water and food and medicine and clothes for when – if – disaster struck, and Cliopher remembered the stockpiles.
There was… a familiar study all in ivory and alabaster, and Cliopher turned to look at his Radiancy. He looked very carefully serene, held himself very still, almost as if nervous.
“There’s more,” he told Cliopher, his voice low and gentle. “So much more. Budgets and treasuries and audits and pages upon pages of reports and numbers, and I have read them all, every one you have brought before me. Because this, too, is all you.”
He waved a hand, and Cliopher looked. At his own old desk, so beloved and yet no longer his. At the balcony opening into the hazy pink afternoon. At the doors of the study, all inexplicably open.
“This cage, made bearable,” his Radiancy said softly. “These doors, finally opened. Myself, alive again.” He paused. “All this happened because you never gave up, because you always found your way no matter how many times you were blown off your course, because you were always just enough, just right what was needed."
Cliopher had to close his eyes against the burning tears at this, his fingers curling tightly around his Radiancy’s (his Radiancy’s!) at the swelling of emotion.
It was… it was so sweet it hurt, so painful it made him want to laugh, hearing those words, being deemed not too little or too much but just the right amount himself by the one whose opinion he valued above everyone else’s.
Cliopher opened his eyes and looked at him, and remembered the inner man he had seen drowning and decided to rescue, remembered the beloved lord he had invited on a vacation, remembered the friend he had held in his arms through a layer of violet angora.
His Radiancy’s voice was earnest, hopeful, wistful. “Will you not wake up and come with me to see this world you’ve built?” he asked.
Cliopher turned to him and, because he could, here in this strange dreamscape, he raised his free hand and brought it gently to his Radiancy’s face, drawing a shuddering breath from him. “I know you,” he said. “Tor.” Another shudder, this one followed by a small, radiant smile.
It was still not the name either of them wanted, but slightly better already. He remembered, now, that he had been promised that secret name, too. He could wait.
He took a deep breath and said, “Yes, I think I will.”