Taka/ Adagio (Part 2)
Slowly, slowly the march began.
And he, who sat on the throne, lifted off, the tips of his azure wings sparking in the cloying air. All around, sand and dust pulsed through cracks, sifting through shrapnel and ruin.
Above, the sky danced. A slow, methodical ritual, of clouds stirring tangentially at first, uncertain of their destination. With the stretch of his fingers they seemed to respond, edges sharpening in a portentous omen.
Through the long hall of the floating citadel trickled the warriors and their charges, dressed in tatters, faces scuffed by decades of travel. It was apparent, from their visages, that a lot had passed- a lot he had slept through, unperturbed, wrapped in the warm void of his chamber. In his presence the visitors dropped to their knees, their eyes cast down to the strange beetles hurrying ceaselessly in circular patterns, creating a massive vortex the center of which stood, always, the seraph.
All of them except one. Center front of their ranks, a rough faced youth, his auburn hair grey and lifeless in the shadow of the ancient towers. He gazed up at the seraph without reverence or awe. Admiration, perhaps, but a facetious sort. Such a firm gaze, from human to seraph, was absurd, certainly not the reception to which Adagio had become accustomed over his many reincarnations. As Adagio stepped forward the beetles about his feet surged suddenly in the direction of the impudent youth, rising as they did in a swarm, forming a pike aimed at the latter's bared throat. The clouds above them leaped into each other. A flash of wild thunder rocked the very foundations of the citadel.
And the youth did not move. He smiled a little at the sudden recognition that had fallen over Adagio's face. All at once the pike fell to the earth, and the insects scrabbled for nooks into which they might vanish. In the strange visitor's fist was a locket of sorts, dangling from a rusted chain. The citadel creaked, tilted a fraction. The chain snapped and it fell to the floor, decades of worn metal giving at last to so mundane an impact. On the sunburst tiles lied fragments of iron and the powdery remains of a moth.
Alone, then.
It was easier to think in a room full of people- the attention could fall anywhere, and so it fell nowhere at all.
With just the two of them, though, things were different. The sun was warm on Adagio's skin, just cleansed, in a lake not far from the citadel. On a table before him laid the pleasure of mortality to which mankind seemed so desperate to cling to- residual gravy, bits of bacon. Eggs.
A little higher, then. Taka. Of the House of Kamuha, then the other houses, the names of which would remain ever so exquisitely mysterious to Adagio for the next few waking weeks, maybe years. Certainly he owed Taka that much.
"You have aged."
Taka smiled, a little. "Gracefully, I like to think."
He set his fork aside and leaned back against his chair, as if to give Adagio a better chance at evaluating the lost years. Aging worked slowly on his features, but the effects were nevertheless there: the roughened jaw, sun-strained eyes, an inscrutability to his expression that had built like a callous over his youth.
"It's the second time," he said. "I'm getting tired- of waiting for you."
As a fleet of clouds passed Adagio stretched his hand beneath the scorching sun, casting an eerie, spider-like shadow over the floor. "It's sweeter than way."
"You've always had a penchant for stalling. I do not, unlike seraphs, have so long a time."
As the sunlight abated, Adagio closed his fist, and the spider that shuddered over porcelain tile blurred, becoming more conspicuous for its unsightliness. "The battle. Tell me again, how it was I was slain."
So, with perhaps less grace than was necessary, Taka recounted for him the battle against the stomguard battalions. How that woman warrior, Catherine, had devastated Adagio at his most crucial casting, in that penultimate moment before he would have wreaked vengeance upon every life thousands of miles around. How Taka, charged to guard him during the preparations, had made a miscalculation, allowing himself to be swarmed by dozens of soldiers and could only watch helplessly from a distance, the last, fitful effort against the elite stormguards, chained, trapped, tied down for a lifetime of imprisonment- a lifetime Adagio would not acquiesce to. So it had been death.
And now it was life. And Adagio recalled in flashes the storm before the battle, those weeks watching as their forces mounted, as Taka appeared and vanished without a word to gather information or destroy it. When he returned to their quarters in the dark hours, shuffling into their bed, too exhausted from wounds of which no one could ask, nor had Adagio wished to. For theirs had been sweet for the distance, the pull-and-push, and even within a meter of each other on the same bed they were as far as sky and sea. Even when pressed against each other's skin, salt from the western realm mingled with some strange incense of the east, they knew nothing of each other at all.
"The battle comes and goes. Like the sun."
As Adagio spoke the noon light brightened again. A small, humorous quirk tugged at his lip.
"Like you. And I."
"I am," Adagio closed his eyes. "So weary."
"You've slept forty years."
This elicited a small laugh from Adagio. "If there is one thing I remember about you- one thing that has never changed- it is this: your terrific humor."
Taka leaned forward, catching Adagio's arm roughly as the latter stood to leave. They stared at each other for a while, but both felt they bore through, and were each looking at some very distant part of their past, a time before the world had numbed all sentiment and turned emotion to illusion. Very quickly, in an almost unfriendly manner, Taka let go of him. Something amounting to contempt eddied across his features, slowly, systematically correcting the tiniest hint of tenderness that had preservered until then. Adagio felt- almost sorry, but then, he did like that detached look a great deal more.
Taka's footsteps echoed over the tiles as he turned and walked away. And once again the beetles wormed out of the darkest nooks and crannies, scenting out their untarnished god. Those blue wingtips of his had long since stopped shimmering. In effect, what he had become was, yet again, that shell of himself into which the strange eastern man would resent yet inevitably fall.