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Seven days.
It has been seven days since Phainon has accepted the trial of divinity, and it has been also seven days since the crown prince of Kremnos had been so out of it.
He's currently lounging at the balcony of his residence, laying on a cushioned cot, eyes of molten gold fixed upon the sky. Given the kind of life he has lived up until that point, Mydei never really got a lot of opportunities to just idle about doing nothing, nor was it ever in his nature to stay put in one place.
And the sunlit sky has never really been that interesting enough to warrant his undivided attention, but right at that moment, it's the only thing that he could hold onto, the only view that could soothe his anxious heart.
His gaze follows a patch of wispy clouds drifting through the skies while conjuring the image of his beloved Deliverer in his mind. After an unspecified amount of time, he furrows his brows.
“No, no… it's not quite the same,” he murmurs under his breath. “Tsk. Not even the glorious skies of Okhema can replicate the allure of your eyes. Just what the hell are you made of…?”
Upon realizing that, the longer he stared at the clouds, the more imperfect the illusion became, until it finally broke apart. Mydei lets out a heavy sigh. A few moments later, the tiny butterfly nymph that had been keeping watch on him over the last three days ever since he'd glued himself to the cushioned cot finally departs, presumably to report on his miserable state to Aglaea.
Mnestia's disciples often preach about the beauty of love, and how falling in love is the most sublime feeling there is in the world. They have compared the experience to a myriad of things that Mydeimos didn't really understand at first—like how falling in love is like walking among the clouds—when he first heard that, he could remember wondering to himself:
How do they even know that? I don't think even the most devout among Aquila's followers would know how to walk on clouds.
And when he heard another disciple say it's like having butterflies in your stomach:
Huh? Who the fuck in their right mind would snack on butterflies to begin with?
Back then, he was still so blissfully unaware of what it's like to be in love, and even when the kind of love those disciples spoke of finally came to him—he remained in denial for quite some time.
There has simply never been a warrior who could match me in the battlefield, he could remember telling himself. That's all there is to my fascination with the Deliverer, and the moment I finally best him in a fight, he'll return to being just another warrior I know, Mydei desperately tried to convince himself as he intently watched with bated breath the way Phainon waltzed through the battlefield with his nimble moves and elegant swordsmanship.
At some point, the prince had stopped trying to suppress the feeling, because he had successfully convinced himself that it should be fine as long as they don't name the feeling.
Mydei allowed himself to indulge in Phainon's loving embrace, savored and cherished him in all ways imaginable behind closed doors. He has committed to his memory the numerous facial expressions the hero could make, his body language when reacting to various stimuli, and even the variance in the tone of his voice as they experience euphoria in all its flavors.
And now… now that the hero's sudden absence has made it painfully clear to Mydei that he is in fact, madly, deeply, irredeemably in love with Phainon, maybe if he were to pass by the same group of those disciples again, he would pitch in his own idea in their discussion and be done with it:
Falling in love is like getting struck by Nikador's lance.
Sure, it sounds rather extreme compared to the disciples’ more ambiguous examples, but if they were to quote him for his unique perspective on love, then it certainly fits his profile as the crown prince of Kremnos.
In his current state, Mydei would narrate his personal experience of falling in love as having a great divine force strike him down, humble him, and leave him utterly in shambles. If it were possible for his emotional state to be visualized as a city, then there is no doubt that even a city that got struck down with an actual Lance of Fury would likely look better than his current emotional state.
They have been apart from each other for longer periods of time when Aglaea would send them on different missions, but not knowing when he would see Phainon again for sure is driving him crazy.
How long is this gonna go on until I end up just like Nikador? Succumbing to madness, after having his sense of reason stripped away from him? Mydei wonders, because he could tell that, slowly but surely, his sheer yearning for Phainon is starting to introduce some unreasonable thoughts into his head.
For starters, seven days isn't even that long. He's a Chrysos Heir who has lived for hundreds of years, and normally for someone of his age, the passing of seven days is something so trivial and transient, something that he normally does not notice anymore. But the past seven days have felt like seven eternities instead, and seven eternities is certainly enough time for an anxious mind to come up with the most outlandish ideas.
What if there's something wrong with the prophecy? What if the entity that took Phainon away was a charlatan, and he's currently being held in a place he cannot escape on his own? How should he break him out then, if that were the case? With his current strength, can he successfully carve out a path from the Vortex of Genesis before his fellow Chrysos Heirs figure out a way to restrain him from his rampage?
What if Phainon is running out of time while he's out here dilly-dallying? Should he act now? What if—
Plop.
Mydei's thoughts are interrupted when he feels something cold fall onto his bare chest. Upon looking, he finds a smooth gemstone, and the same butterfly nymph from before fluttering in the air.
“Did you bring this by yourself?” He asks the nymph. It does not respond, although it did return to the spot it had been observing him from before.
The prince holds out the aquamarine gemstone against the sky. Without sufficient lighting, the stone looks quite ordinary on its own, but held up against the sky as its backdrop, it does manage to at least emulate a small part of the radiance that had always drawn him to Phainon's eyes.
His heart aches, and a soft sigh escapes Mydei's lips. “Seriously, what's taking you so long…?”
Come back soon, he pleads as he holds the gemstone over his heart and closes his eyes, as though in prayer. Come back before madness consumes me. Please.
…
When Mydeimos opens his eyes once more, the familiar sight of Marmoreal Palace's domed ceiling greets him. He's currently in the private baths reserved for Chrysos Heirs, and next to him is the man he'd been longing to see over the past seven days, peeling a pomegranate.
It didn't take him that long to make sense of what's going on at that moment—he must've fallen asleep, and the gemstone must've pulled him into this dream, a memory from a time not too long ago.
Aglaea had once sent them on a mission to retrieve some relics from one of Oronyx's abandoned temples, and that was when the Kremnoan prince first learned of the existence of dream-inducing artifacts, specifically ones that draw upon the user's memories.
That was also the first and only time he'd seen Phainon shed tears of genuine sorrow, as the hero unintentionally activated one during their search. Mydei could remember feeling a dull ache in his heart back then, and thinking back on the experience, it wasn't simply just because seeing his beloved sad also made him sad—rather, it pained him so much more that he's known this valiant warrior for so long, and yet he barely knows anything about the reason behind those tears.
All he knows is that Phainon had lost everything before—but isn't that the same exact thing everyone else knows about the hero's past?
Mydei feels a profound sense of shame—yes, no one can argue with the fact that out of the Chrysos Heirs, he knows Phainon the best, having indulged in everything that the hero has to offer and definitely having seen way more than the others—but at the end of the day, it all feels so damn shallow.
What right do I have to consider myself your other half when I don't even know what your soul looks like? I need to know… I want to see it... but I don't even know how to ask.
“Open up, my grumpy prince,” Phainon asks as he offers to feed him some pomegranate seeds. The dream is consistent with what he can recall of that day, when he lost a bet and his punishment was to consume his pomegranates by directly ingesting the fleshy seeds, instead of squeezing them into a juice.
Mydei wonders if the dream will break apart if he were to act differently than he did from before—but finds himself already acting on his impulses before he could truly weigh his options.
In his memories, he'd crankily told the white-haired man to shut up as he took the seeds from his hand. This time though—
“Mydei…?” The prince's sudden enthusiasm to eat the seeds on his hand surprised the hero. He could feel a surge of heat coursing through his veins as he watched his fellow warrior eagerly lick and suck on his fingers, long after he'd consumed all the seeds.
“And here I thought you didn't like having your pomegranates like this,” Phainon comments after Mydei pulls back. He does not understand the reason behind the sudden change in his companion's behavior, nor does he know that he is simply part of a dream, but this Phainon thinks that if it were possible to melt under the heat of someone's intense, loving gaze, he would've melted on the spot.
“Hey,” Phainon brushes a thumb over Mydei's lower lip, then adorably tilts his head to one side—(to this day, the prince still doesn't know whether the hero does that on purpose because he knows it turns him on, or if it is truly just an innate part of his mannerisms)—then asks a question, one that Mydei himself has been dying to ask Phainon himself for such a long time:
“What's going on in your head?”
The curious look in his eyes tells Mydei that Phainon must be thinking that he's thinking about something complicated, something way above his intellectual capacity, but the truth behind his thoughts is rather simple:
I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you so damn much, and I never expected that not knowing how you're doing out there could hurt and crush my heart more than a direct, body-obliterating hit from Nikador's lance. Please come back. Please. I'm going crazy. I think my hair is gonna start falling out. I love you. When I wake up, I hope you're already back in my arms. Please.
Those disciples never mentioned anything about how falling in love is also like yearning for the clouds as a bird with injured wings.
So instead of answering his question, Mydei pulls Phainon for a kiss. Slow and chaste at first, then he pulls back to stare into the hero's half-lidded eyes and handsome face, before leaning in for another kiss—slightly faster and more desperate. The prince repeats those actions like a ritual a few more times, steadily increasing the intensity of his kiss each time he comes back for more.
By the time Mydei finally gives him enough time to actually catch his breath, Phainon's lips have already swollen from all the kissing, his hair a disheveled mess from the way the yearning prince has handled him.
“Hey, if you keep kissing me like that, I'm gonna start thinking that you've—”
—fallen in love with me, but that's something Phainon already knows even without verbal confirmation… and he didn't want to breach the topic even as a passing and playful comment, because he wants Mydei to be the one to bring it up first.
“—had something weird for breakfast,” Phainon knows it wasn't the best segue he could've come up with, but it's better than accidentally drawing out an unplanned confession.
Mydei finally breaks his silence.
“Yeah… I think I ate a butterfly.”
The kind of butterfly Mnestia's disciples won't shut the fuck up about when talking about love... you know, the one that lives inside your stomach.