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The deal with the Lantern King had left marks upon Hadrian's skin.
They covered him like tattoos of light, living coils of energy that resembled the Eldest's mighty rings of fire, that wrapped around arms and legs and torso, buzzing with potentiality. Hadrian wielded magic in one hand and blade in the other -- he knew how to call upon sharpened instinct and rigorous learning both. This power, this burning light, it was all instinct, all will, and as he let the simmering potential swell into every corner of his mind, its growing light drowned out other, duller marks.
The coils of light detached and hovered just above his skin, whirling covetously around him, and with that, magic spilled out of him. Objects in his room began to float, to spin, to throw themselves out of place, wheeling around the center of gravity that was his presence. Roiling chaotic energy rippled beneath Hadrian’s skin and yearned to unseat everything in the room, in the great hall beyond, in the capital, in the kingdom, in the world. But with effort of will, Hadrian coaxed it into calm and brought the radiant coils to order, made them sink back down until they were little more than shifting tattoos upon his body.
It left his blood pumping hard within his veins and filled his chest with shaky exhilaration. He didn't have fine control yet, but that would come. Just as his magus abilities had come to heel despite everything.
The exhilaration within him swelled even more and made his head spin, like it was spilling over, taking on a life of its own. The rushing in his ears became the sound of a rolling, joyous laugh. The room shifted again, the air itself rippling like disturbed waters, the outlines of furniture growing dim and then bursting with undulating colors.
Hadrian's bed and desk had been to his left. Now, they stood to his right, and the carpet beneath his feet had shifted in pattern. The window was no longer black with night -- a cool blue glow streamed through the stone, and more than just orange candlelight suffused the room, though no great whirling fire appeared. The laughter petered out, but delight remained in the voice that spoke.
"You learn so quickly," the Lantern King said, firm and resounding within Hadrian's head and yet distant, as if beyond the closed door of his bedroom. "Come, come, my herald. I want to show you something."
So much for just knocking. Hadrian knew that he no longer stood within his kingdom, his home, at least not as he knew it, and yet he wasn't afraid. Not even with Marrow safely separated from him at last, no longer strengthening him, no longer dependent on him to survive. Hadrian had been able to use his newfound power for a great many things -– restoring Linzi, giving Marrow a body of its own -– but the trembling of energy beneath his skin told him that he had only just begun.
The throne room was empty, except for the figure reclined upon the throne. The Horned Hunter sat lazily in Hadrian's seat, goat legs sprawled in idle invitation. The Hunter wore no helmet this time, his head crowned only with enormous ram horns. The face beneath was handsome and yet hard to pin down, as if chiseled jaw gave way to round curve of cheek and then back again in a shifting mirage. The Hunter's eyes glowed with wild, mischievous fire, anticipation gleaming as he grinned at Hadrian.
"What do you think?" the Lantern King asked, with a flourish of his arms.
Hadrian came to a dumbfounded stop before the throne. He arched an eyebrow and looked the Eldest up and down. "About what?"
The Lantern King's arms drooped. "This," he said impatiently, which clarified nothing. "Does it please you? Mortals often find these creatures irresistible."
Hadrian followed the logic, then, and warmth flushed his cheeks. "This... form?" he ventured. The Horned Hunter was a satyr, but only on the surface. Immense power roiled beneath, and Hadrian could see it now. Couldn't help but see it.
"Yes!" the Lantern King said. "You killed me with such relish. Surely you enjoyed having me and all of this at your mercy like so."
"I killed you because you're an asshole," Hadrian said waspishly.
The Lantern King only chuckled. "Such fire," he said admiringly, his burning eyes tracking the length of Hadrian's form.
"What are you doing?" Hadrian sighed, because surely this wasn't happening in his own throne room –- its First World counterpart or not -– and surely this particular Eldest found it enormously funny. Hadrian, on the other hand, did not. And yet, why was he surprised? Lonely had many meanings, after all.
The burning eyes met his gaze and held it fast. Hadrian could have moved if he wanted to. He didn't want to. The fire burned like the sun, like something that Hadrian hadn't known until he'd crawled up to the surface, and the tattoos upon his body glowed even brighter in their eternal march across his skin.
"It does please you," the Lantern King said in satisfaction, and he rose up from the throne and strode forward off the dais in a few quick motions.
So quick that Hadrian could hardly react, until powerful arms had wrapped around him and carried him backwards, lifting his feet from the ground as his backside hit the table and the map of the Kingdom of the Shrike there. Hadrian scrabbled for purchase against those arms, a cold pounding of his heart drowning the heat within him as the Hunter bore down upon his neck with an intensity befitting the title. "Wait, wait, stop!"
The Hunter froze. His head drew back like a startled animal. He studied Hadrian for a long moment, and the burning gaze sent a chill dripping down Hadrian's spine.
"Why are you frightened?" the Lantern King demanded, as if he was... alarmed?
"I'm not," Hadrian said at once -- far, far too defensive.
"I am the Laughing Lie," the Lantern King said, a bit of dry amusement crackling through his bewilderment. "You'll have to try harder than that." The Hunter's head tilted curiously, and his grip on Hadrian relented. "You don't like this form?"
Hadrian caught his breath and sighed again, making sure that his feet were firmly planted beneath him as he straightened. Barest inches still separated him from the Hunter, and Hadrian reached out, hesitant at first, but growing in confidence, to push gently against the muscular arms and create a little more space between them. The Lantern King didn't resist, observing him in puzzlement, and Hadrian marveled at it. At the power that rested beneath his fingertips, contained within a form that was trying to please him, at the way it had halted merely at the sound of his voice.
"Well..." Hadrian said, his dubious gaze drawn inadvertently downward.
The Lantern King stared at him for a moment longer, then took a step back and burst into raucous laughter. "Oh!" he said, bending with the force of his musical giggling. "You have a problem with fur? That is too much, my herald, too much."
The laughing part of his title was certainly no joke. Hadrian watched in oddly fond bemusement as the Hunter wiped away a few stray tears of mirth.
"Easily fixed," the Lantern King said and, in a glimmering twist of light, became Octavia.
Or, at least, an Octavia whose features didn't seem quite right, not quite aligned with what Hadrian knew intimately. It twisted something unpleasantly within Hadrian's insides.
"Better?" the Lantern King asked, with a toss of curly hair.
"No," Hadrian said flatly.
Octavia blinked at him. "You play favorites, dear champion? How scandalous." The lines of Octavia's form shimmered and shifted and grew and became Regongar. And yet not quite Regongar.
"No again," Hadrian said, even more flat.
The Lantern King looked well and truly confused now, mystification plastered upon Regongar's face. It made Hadrian itch with annoyance, with another kind of longing. The two were only gone for a short few days, and yet he'd gotten so used to being inseparable in the glow of new marriage that he had to learn how to be alone again. Without another voice sharing his head at all times.
Except he wasn't alone. Marrow was never far anyway, and Hadrian had a kingdom and more friends than he knew what to do with. And a great big flaming Eldest who was doing a gods-awful job of things right now.
"You don't get it, do you?" Hadrian asked.
He enjoyed the look of exasperation that garnered, though it didn't last long. The Lantern King wasn't the type to stay mired in one mood or another, and he laughed again. "And you like to play games, don't you?" the Lantern King asked, with a genuine warmth that filled the room like the haze of a summer's day. "Well. I surrender, then. You have won this game. Tell me what it is you want, and you shall have it."
It was more than a little hard to turn down, but by now, Hadrian had a sense of how to direct things, where this creature was concerned. "And here I thought you wouldn't turn down a game,” Hadrian said, and the Lantern King frowned with Regongar's face. "First, I want you to tell me what it is you've done wrong."
The Lantern King sighed. The air stirred like a spring's breeze. "I have certainly failed to understand you, at the very least," he said, impatience creeping in. "What is it? Do you dislike the location? Do you crave some form that I am not aware of?" Hadrian remained silent, and someone who wasn't quite Regongar anymore tossed his head and glared in impotent frustration. "You play vexing games, my herald, but," the irritation disappeared beneath a coy smile, "I suppose you have learned faster than I have."
"You're slow on the uptake, aren't you?" Hadrian agreed. He knew how to catch this Eldest's interest and hold it well enough.
The Lantern King looked torn between snapping at him and laughing. He settled for gritting teeth that were even sharper than Regongar's. "If you would be so kind," he said, every word visibly ground out between cracks in his pride, "I must once again concede victory to you."
Hadrian gave it one more long moment, in which it looked as if the Lantern King's mortal form might shudder apart with his great ire, and then said, "You haven't even asked me."
Burning eyes blinked again, and the not-Regongar lost its clear definition, flickering like the throne room's blue-tinted firelight. "Oh," the Lantern King said, and the skin of a mortal fell away, revealing a lithe form of fire that once again doubled with laughter, a toothy grin of sparks as wide as the horizon. A much greater form lurked within, and Hadrian could almost see it, burning away at the Lantern King's heart. But contained, for now. "I have truly lost touch with the ways of mortals and these silly forms. You want to be courted! "
Close enough, Hadrian supposed. For a being like this, anyway. "It wouldn't hurt," Hadrian said, "but no, it's more than that."
Like moth to flame, the Lantern King's gaze snapped back to him, and the laughter faded away. He was all fire now, and he drew the eye all the more for it. He gazed at Hadrian curiously, unblinkingly.
It was still strange. Having the attention of a creature like this fixed so intently on him. Being honest with the Laughing Lie, of all beings, and expecting something reciprocal in return. Hadrian wasn't even sure how much the Lantern King would take seriously. He'd taken Hadrian's requests for a bare minimum of moderation well enough, even if he'd whined and cajoled and demanded like a toddler robbed of a favorite toy. But was that all an Eldest like him was capable of? It was maybe a bit too flattering that he found Hadrian interesting in all possible ways, and Hadrian would be lying if he said that the Lantern King hadn't gotten thoroughly under his skin with talk of loneliness and all, but...
Hadrian drew his shoulders up straight. "I'm a married man now," he said briskly. "I don't do this kind of nonsense anymore. Maybe you think it's funny to fuck a mortal for one night, but that's not what I want, and I'm not going to be some prank for you."
The Lantern King tilted his head, and the fire curled into a new shape -– the Horned Hunter, but with a human's legs instead of a goat's. The eyes of fire remained the same, boring into Hadrian like the Eldest before him was searching far and wide for something within him.
"Did I not promise you eternity?" the Lantern King asked, and his voice was no longer merry. The intensity of his sudden understanding crackled through the air, and Hadrian shivered as it rolled through the tattoos that roamed across his body. "Have I not watched you from the moment you set foot in the Stolen Lands? Would I have done so if I found you dull and uninspiring, or a mere passing joke? Would I have shared my light with a mortal who was not enthralling and capable of withstanding my fire?"
The tattoos glowed hot and quick. Hadrian stared, and stared some more, and the burning eyes of the Hunter met his unflinchingly.
In two steps, Hadrian's hands were back on the Hunter's arms, and his lips crashed into the Hunter's eager mouth. He pushed, hard this time, and the Lantern King gladly gave way, back up the dais, back into the throne, Hadrian's throne, where Hadrian pressed the Hunter into the seat and chased his kiss. The skin underneath his grasping fingers didn't feel quite solid, as if the flesh might easily give way to the fire that lay beneath, but no heat scorched him, and the Hunter's grip did not close in with the crushing force of a deity.
Once, Hadrian might've wanted that force anyway, no matter what broke beneath. But it had been a while since pain had done anything for him except weigh him down and make him worse.
When he broke away, the Hunter grinned, his mouth a little too wide for his face. "I see," was all the Lantern King said, in the manner of great discovery.
"No more," Hadrian said, though he didn't push himself up, leaving himself halfway straddled across the Hunter's lap. "Not yet."
"Oh, you are a monster." The Lantern King gave him a spectacular frown, a pout that nonetheless held the edges of mischief. His hands released their grip, and his arms draped lazily over the sides of the throne. "You dangle the promise of fun experiences before me and then take them away. I haven't been this entertained in quite some time."
Hadrian rolled his eyes to the rafters above. "I want to talk to Regongar and Octavia first," he said. "Before we... go any further."
"Are they given to jealousy?" the Lantern King asked with great interest. "There are three of you. I have noticed that mortals often pair in twos. You simply must explain to me the intricacies of it all at some point. I've never paid much attention otherwise."
This was certainly going to be an entirely new journey. But Hadrian didn't find himself regretting it –- any of it. Long had he stumbled around in the dark, unsuited for it, given to mistake after mistake, until it had seen him stumble his way here, to the surface where the sun rose. He could have withered away in the sun's unfamiliar light, just as unsuited, but he hadn't. He'd made it all the way here, and here he was going to stay.
"It's got nothing to do with jealousy," Hadrian said, and his voice sharpened to a deliberate point. "We talk to each other and ask permission first, with... intimacy."
"I assume that's directed at me," the Lantern King said cheerily. "I will remember that. Meanwhile, talk to them if you must. They're welcome to join, if they wish. I have no mortal hang-ups."
Yeah, probably not. Neither Regongar nor Octavia would begrudge Hadrian this, though he had no doubt that Octavia would worry for a bit and do her level best to threaten an Eldest until she was sure of things. But even Regongar didn't quite have Hadrian's taste for... well, the strange.
"And yes," Hadrian said, clambering off the Hunter at last, with as much dignity as he could muster, "I want to be courted."
The Horned Hunter flickered with warm, curling fire. "That is easily arranged," the Lantern King said, anticipation in his burning eyes as he watched Hadrian step away from the dais. The weight of his gaze traveled down Hadrian's back with a tremor, like the deep places of the world disturbed by rivers of flowing flame. "After all, my herald," the Lantern King smirked and waved, and the blue edges of the place began to shimmer out of existence, as the First World retreated and the Material Plane returned, leaving only the echo of an incandescent voice, "we have an eternity."