Archive of Our Own ^beta

Saparata meets him on the shore. As rich as the island can get, its outposts entrance him the most. Rings of stone perch unwaxed by hands, their faces unmoored from the shadow of great birch. By the fore pokes a vanishing border of brine, their sibilance on the sands agnostic to the rest of land. Life by the sea is lesser, but never barren. Not here.

When he nears the person bent over the crafting table, he pauses. Saps has a thumb on the corner of the page, seeing fiction. The sandstones come in reverie, but the face that peers up at him is flesh.

"Saparata." Fluixon's newly crafted pickaxe sits neglected on the bench. In the before, he had also watched when Saparata once pooled the sea of Theria at his feet.

"Hey." The air shapes around his lips, as if he has parted something monumental. Saparata feels it, a dispossession from reality, that the honeyed sun won't cast over he who hunches to avoid it. There are so many same differences. "It's been a while."

The brine draws back. Saparata keeps searching for familiarity.

"Is that all you have to say?" Fluixon still sits on his haunches, and if he weren't some cynosure of mind, he would nothing more than hunter, shadow. Saparata wonders what he sees of him.

This is no reverie. They are different, too much for their effaced past to care. Saparata has lost the damaged parts of him, when they've been harmed that much from his own wars. Any time could be then, but Saparata chooses to be now.

Seeds of hope break up from the pit of his chest. "No. Want to team?"

"I have men. You should meet them." Finally, Fluixon rises. He inclines his head towards the thick of jungle that Saps hasn't noticed at all in this singular interval. "We should go mining."

"Alright," he simply says.

A wave rolls in, making him anew. Saparata trembles at the coolness, forcing back a yelp. Impossibly, he looks back. Fluixon is laughing at him, swatting at the air as if he is already close enough to hit him.

"Really, now? Do that again when I'm the one getting all the diamonds." Saparata moves before Fluixon does, like he knows where he is heading. He doesn't, but he does know that he is already swept away, stolen.

"Oh, we'll see." Fluixon smiles back at him, those twin scars on the corner curving moons with their undefined promise. "Do you want to make an enemy of me?"

The first few days, Fluixon complains of the saltwater and heat. They follow the upturn of waves, their faint veneer on the sea tracked by a sort of tethered freedom. Saparata follows a man of ambition in the same way, going southerly for any purpose but to be a faint wave on the pages of a vaster thalassa.

He deviates from course, building fugitive paths through the border between sand and water. Their welcomes lake at his feet, neither abandoned nor dispossessed. Only solitary. He doesn't know what either of them are searching for, just that they must.

Albeit, Fluixon will get dragged into his current for a short while.

"The water's going to rust my prosthesis!"

"What?" Saparata comes closer, eyes glistening with Pandora's sunburn. More droplets attack their bare legs, their sleeves and trousers rolled up for the experience of watching Fluixon stew in the shallows like the true surface dweller he is.

"Transradial." He extends his left arm, catching more glare from the sun. "You wouldn't know what happened."

Saparata peers past the reflex to shut his eyes, noting every plate that slots together in its flexible places. Fluixon's prosthesis is a whole mechanism, its form enshrined in a dark silver not unlike the belly of a coelacanth. Their fangs aren't just simple touch, but an intrication of slopes, flexing for his demonstration.

He thinks it suits him. "It's beautiful. How?"

"Theria," he only says. "I was recreated without Ish's regard. Maybe he hated my cowardice."

"You're not Jophiel."

"I'm not you," he agrees.

They don't talk about it anymore.

When the third sun climbs, they gouge out the earth. It is easy finding the vines by the entrance, their iron deposits bulging out like a mouth singing of wealth. Diamonds, too, stick out in troves.

Between them, they both find plenty. Plentiful is relative in plethora, however. Fluixon takes on the duty of testing his patience about it. "You'd wish you could have my luck." The corner of his lip apprehends a poise that Saparata will learn all too well.

"No one finds a fourty-vein just like that," he mutters over his shoulder, counting the diamonds one by one, not for the first time. "Is an Admin watching over you? Did you gain their halo of brilliance?"

With all the grace of his delegation, Fluixon dissembles his compliment. "Snowbird found it first. I'm not Ish-blessed, okay?"

Be it further luck or not, the concept materialises. "Hey guys, how's it doing?—"

Fluixon screams, hurling a diamond at God's face.

Saparata rows.

The oars set a drowsy pace, though he doesn't let up. Finding some place to settle is imperative, and the established populaces won't do. He had visited them for leisure: Tricolor in its ordered glory, Aperion's sharp tact, and the Coalition's freeform affair. The smaller powers form distinct shapes in their institution, but they are always with creed, or rife with cult he refuses to chorus. They don't strike Theria in him. Nothing ever will.

He'd be by his lonesome, a wayfarer curving the archipelago, if it weren't for Flux. This time, the coarser aspects of their dispositions grate against each other.

"Choose somewhere open." Fluixon rests his hands on the sides, luxuriating on the stern with all the measure of royal inheritance.

"Stop treating it like it's a backrest," he snaps. "You're going to capsize us."

"Then row faster." For the sake of it all, he even stretches his arms above his head, his jaw reserving a yawn that speaks of the countless council meetings he's been subjected to. "You're going to put my men to sleep at the rate you're going."

Saparata's head flicks back to his shadowers. They loom behind him like a conspiracy of the swamp, ever silent and watchful. He stares back at the task logged in their faces. "Hey, I don't think they're going to doze off any time soon."

"Why are we even in this dense torture chamber?" Fluixon jostles the boat, tipping their total weight forward. "Going around the outskirts would most definitely hassle us less."

He hisses to himself about the way of the world. Saparata won't say it louder, or he may never dock anywhere. Arguing with Fluixon within the throes of a muddy embankment is a low-tier idea.

Out of the corner of Saps' eye, he sees him blow off a curtain of vines from his face. Imperious twit.

"I don't want to be seen by, what, pirates?" Saparata, despite their bickering, rows faster. "Either way, it'll be bad if I get too close to a major group. Dealing with politics is too troublesome."

For a while, the only sounds are of water, chiming their disturbances down upon the stillness they came from. Saparata can almost feel Fluixon, his mind stirring unknowns that haunt the stern in its own policy. Light splices through the tangle of swamp roots when he finally makes his verdict.

"Alright, up to you." Fluixon places a hand on the side of the boat, feeling the sea breeze. "Pretty temperate. I think we're changing to the right kind of Southern parts. Aren't they abandoned? Dispossessed?"

"So far, we haven't seen any sign of inhabitation," he replies. "Doesn't mean that there aren't any people."

Still, the group don't offer themselves to community, finding a grand dip of a mangrove-infested mountain before any ripple of intelligent life. Scaling their unionised vision for Saparata's resort begins in digging out masses of sand from the shores. All the while, he hears Fluixon recount his troubles with Luminaran politics.

"While you were touring Tricolor, I had to deal with those crudes of logic back home. Legacy, oh, don't even get me started on that cavorter. Going to Mattel of all places! Each grain of sand here can't even begin to comprise what's wrong with our government." Fluixon pauses. "Of course— no insult to Gotoga and Snowbird, they're perfectly refined people in and out of this jester's court." He waves to his men, who perk up, shooting him back various iterations of acknowledgement.

The act of standing up whilst freeing his hands to wave at his leader causes Gotoga's leg to push down on the handle of the spade, flinging a great bout of sand to the limits of the sky.

"Stop getting sand in my eyes!" Thomas yells, swinging his pickaxe down with a dose of spite. "Work together, not against me!"

The group shifts, a sort of placid harmony about their peripheral reactions. Hvy restrains himself from deep laughter. New executes the shores in contention. Gotoga quickly turns away, penitent, as Snowbird watches with rapt attention.

"Whoops," Saparata says in place of Gotoga. He turns back to Fluixon. "Where were you, again? Something about you being the world's biggest hater?"

Fluixon's nose scrunches up. "I am not hating. It is justifiably a commentary on the signatory logistics of—-"

"Okay, okay." Saparata gasps without meaning to. "What in Ish's name? You weren't like this before."

"I haven't changed. You just didn't know me." Holding a significant chunk of sandstone, he attempts to stand up under observation. Fluxion trudges to their makeshift stores in no shortage of utmost devotion. Silence fills the air in its absence, their waves seething into manmade holes with their restless rasps.

"That's… debatable." Saparata watches him, his progress slowing down. The pickaxe embeds, cracking sandstone. "I know enough about you to know you shouldn't be carrying that with your fragile back."

"I recall a certain someone who jumped off an obelisk to break their own." Then, as if his social contract to Saparata chooses to amount to his own wiles, Fluixon parts without further preamble.

The mention, so passive in its time, staggers Saparata. Theria, as the last page, has printed on this new sky. With a heavy heart, he is for excavation, hoping for a direction that he can move towards. Saparata is like this, some undefined structure waiting for an exertion to defile it.

Fluixon leaves to Luminara. Saps waves him off, the lines to his art gone. Still, he dreams up grand, foolish ideas, so resource expendable that Fluixon will surely rattle off about some cerebral notion that Saparata has desecrated, once he returns.

He that finds he can wait. Saparata may petrify himself to the spot until his counterpart to thought returns, waiting for those saliences to taper back in reversal. For now, he leaves himself stranded on the duned fringes, eyes tracking an ambition he's abandoned, but a man he has not.

No one will know if he climbs up the mountain to conjure a fantasy, where we will be so high up on a plateau that he will not fall. To have no opportunity to do so means a peace, one that refuses to manifest in the hard lines of its word. It means removal.

The Summit happens. Fluixon sits, no longer prescribed to his stature. He stands, gone elsewhere— right at the riptide's fore. Saps casts it into omission.

With the materials accreted into vague ideas for a resort, Saparata draws up the formal schematic. Fluixon hovers over his shoulder in all his ghost of a bearing, their marginal distance from contact lop-siding lines on the parchment.

"Could you not be so close? This is a suggestion, not a demand of presence." Saparata grinds his teeth, driving unruly designs into effect like they are regretful tattoos.

"Don't be so daft. You may not like it, but my contribution is what's called peak performance." Finally, Fluixon moves, but not to lean in closer. "Anyhow. I'm going to check up on my men, so keep going at it. You're doing fine."

"That's not what you said earlier." He scratches off a misaligned vertex, their lines not quite touching. A personal work of abdication fills in where Fluixon once was, its shape more material than stolen.

Saparata looks back, thinking he is the only one. Flux is already there.

On their leaner days, they twist the great canvases of jungle trees, marrying them into the outcasted terrain. To switch it up, they'll watch each other fell the great oaks in a labour of destruction that Flux calls their creation. Saps calls it gardening.

"—Yeah, and you're a pretentious prick!" He cups his hands to let the sound carry out, knowing that it can't truss up the sheer height of olden timber.

"What? I can't hear you," Flux sings, hacking off the remaining branches with unneeded force. "Did you say something that you'd like to repeat?"

Saps makes a noncommittal gesture, tilting his hand side by side. "It's such a shame that I can't hear you from down here. If only you'd fall down so I could have a proper conversation."

A stick flies at him. Saparata barely manages to dodge, cursing.

With mock confusion, Flux frames his own free hand to his ear, mouthing the words at an infuriating rate. "It's such a shame that I practically live up here with how much work you've been shifting onto me. If only I could be anything other than your pretentious prick of a slave."

"You're just sun-shy— and the worst kind of aristocrat." Another stick flies at him. Saps hops back on one foot, cursing. "Do that again, I dare you. This is my island you're messing around on."

Finally, Flux scales down the bark with some amount of face, slinging sacks of material the mass of a sun on Saps. For this, he rewards him with a kick to the junction of his foot.

"This island isn't registered on the world map." An insolent smile gilds him. "Since I'm this 'worst kind of aristocrat' that you've so graciously mentioned, I could exert my sole power to have us known. Officially recognised, if you will."

Saps throws up his hands. "Just another Corvus, aren't you?"

Fluixon's smile goes flat, dropping forecast into the fathoms of Saps' chest. His voice rakes up like a malicious metronome. "I'm no Corvus, or any impotent leader associated with the aggressor. Don't compare me with their Ravens Guard, or Requiem, or even Westhelm's soon-to-be ravings for senseless blood."

Though Saps knows that they will only spin into cleaving at recent lesions, he is not yet anything but a half-peeled page with little story to beguile from, and less words to write the shapes of others about. The fires are unwritten. "You're handing away my property and my choice to third parties. Nevermore's current election, hello."

"Look who's no recluse now?" The gleam of Fluixon's axe catches his eye through tight gestures. His voice drops, eyes softening out. "You've misinterpreted what I meant. Of course I'd ask you first."

Saps snorts, the bog in his chest splitting. "I think you're misinterpreting yourself. If you weren't a politician, you'd be spending most of your time down in the mines."

"You act like I want to lead this fool's pursuit." There again, contention simmers on Fluixon's every, tucked away by a cursory sheath of his axe into holster. This time, Saps prepares himself, hunted by his own choices. "What chest do these go in?"

The bog drains entirely. Streams of light touch down on Flux, disbanded by every curl that dresses the hood of his potent regard. Saps stares at the plutonian sea. The leviathan, he casts into omission.

"I'm going to go dress the sandstone. Figure it out yourself." Saps drops the sacks on the ground with a dramatic thump. With that, he dusts his hands clean and saunters off, deploying Fluixon's gait for good retribution. A politician's evasion at its finest.

Flux's voice grows farther, disgruntled. Saps walks faster.

That is one of many crests on their sea of fond enmities.

Again, as they hook starry mistakes into their aggregates, and slice off real bevels, Flux gives him grief. From the time they finish hewing out the area, to the time that they place the first legs for pillars, Flux gives him poise in his false ability. Many arguments are had over object permanence.

Fast follows the dusk purples spent around a bonfire, with Flux's friends, and to Saps, his allies. They don't call each other by name, but sing tunes in the same shape it draws from. Bereft of diamonds to pick out, they swing around different picks made for tethering a home.

Flux sits across Saps, perched on the thickest part of the log, as though he were the herald of mood. This is a wrong occurrence, now made rare in their days. If Saps were to sit beside Flux, unbarred by his company, they would find each other as a hide against a hunter's back would. Shoulder against shoulder. Arm battling arm. Hand on wrist. Saparata always pulls away first, watching when it happens. Flux watches him back.

The same demand gleams through the inferno. New feeds another stick to the campfire, as it belches on a lax kind of composure from its chief existence. When Flux gathers his friends, there is a primacy that circles around him, binding, defined. It happens when he speaks.

"Sing us a tune, will you?" Flux demands, much to Hvy's agreeable excitement.

Saps orients himself toward Hvy, wondering just what swims beneath the sea of duty. Instead, the entire weight of the stage appeals him, their collective eyes shoring with interest. "…Me? I'm not— I mean, I can't really sing. I don't know any local songs." He doesn't mention that he'd rather not visit Theria's music, either.

"You may not be as thespian, or, have as procured a palette as I," Flux starts.

Saps stares at him.

"—But you're creative enough to weave a stave or two," he finishes.

Safely, for the flame's lifespan choking up the logs, Saps doesn't 'weave a stave or two'. He thumbs the hem of his robes listening to Hvy's hearty rendition of Jaw's Ballad. Clippings of Snowbird's joins in, to Saps' surprise, a mild crackle not unlike vinyl. Gotoga's pitches lag behind, his openings hiked up and sometimes too loud. New merely watches, strumming the flat of his blade like a resonant instrument.

Thomas smiles with Fluixon, though he often shoots looks at Saps as if suggesting something. The last of the fire ends with Hvy's low bellow, their wavers hunting cinders to the ground. Saps hears the sea roar their shanties back, wishing, reaching.

"That was amazing, Hvy! Your range is impressive, and Snowbird, you provided some good support. Gotoga… remembered the lyrics, I suppose."

Full body derision racks Thomas. "You suppose? I guess you're right."

"Hey, I was lagging!" Gotoga argues. "Maybe an Admin cursed me, or something."

"We all have our faults." New's back seems to uncoil, had it not been the sum total of perfect before. "Even weaknesses can turn into weapons." His eyes flick to Saps, then back. "We'll talk later."

"How sage of you, Kids." Fluixon's hand lowers, slightly. In an instant, the coterie adjourns. They draw hard lines around their contours, Gotoga in the rear, Snowbird quiet, Hvy pliant, and New cutting off. Order in the court. Somewhere on the border between domain and omission, disparity etches itself in bold truths.

Like twine, Fluixon's cheer bridges to the other half, impassable. "It's not fair at all that I haven't had my turn to sing, right lads?" He twirls his hands like a conductor's over his friends' resounding affirmation. Its absurdity, so alike Flux, is enough to reset the coldness dripping through his swamped cognition.

Saps had imagined Fluixon to be theatrical, but not overdone. He isn't theatrical at all, conquering the heath left where the fire had sang, compressed into one, decisive line. Fluixon leads each note on in their absolute sequences, his language turned to sea, dueting a husk on the unified air. The sky's docile drifts cannot blow away an architect of sound. This is grandness, in its own quiet arrangements.

An oracy strums up so strange in Saps' chest that he wonders if his body was ever dormant. Awareness falls to the same strain, towering a pensive reality on the circle posted around the campfire. The last notes will stray into air, and they'll sit up for the coming moment. Sound will disappear. He needs to touch it, to know he was there.

He reaches out to the last slips of Fluixon's voice. First to reach. Last to part.

"And from the willows, to Tricolor's sea. Through Aperion, to Concumal, north finds luminaries. Innovation is a hard truth, their ideals' a boat. Sailing 'cross the border, fear keeps it afloat. But fear will make tides, send them to boiling shores— they craft waves of battle, and unending gores. War's a fiction, until it is not. It sits as tight as Pandora's box. Unity, to be truth, must guard legacy, for Yggdrasil—"

"Stop." Flux's eyes harden. "You've said enough."

Saps falters. The ton of his words sink its teeth into his ending lilts, their melodies all but deadened by revelation. "That was only geography," comes tight out of a separate chamber of his throat. "Guess I'm my own poet, huh?"

"Those words were abberant," Fluixon echoes. The clamour of how he rises almost sounds like a concession. "I liked the part about Pandora. The island." Not the other constituent. Least of all, the box.

His crew stands with him. They collapse the logs, stamp on the last cinder, and trial docility on their last hums. Saps stands in the same manner, stretching discomfort out of the smoke-filled cavity in his chest. Gotoga, or perhaps Thomas, compliments his singing. He hears it with his own voice attuned to decorum, but his memory holds onto the finished silence, charred down to cartilage.

The Summit holds fast.

Saps casts it into omission, but he is not the first to.

Flux warms a hand into the nook of his shoulder. "I'm sorry about that. You had the most beautiful voice in the world. Like…" His hand tightens.

"Like the sky?" Saps asked, amused.

"Yeah, or some other phrase from an excessive epistolary. This may be troublesome for me to say, but I do mean it when I say that…" Flux discontinues. He overrides himself.

"You? Excessive?" Genuine shock shows on his face. Saps covers his open mouth. "I didn't know that."

"It's only right that we were the definition of sarcastic together." Flux pinches out, malice composed to its full extent. "Oh, Captain, won't you show me how to really sail songs?"

"Talking about me in past tense, eh?" Saps bucks him off, his mouth baring up white tributes of idility. "You're not leaving my island any time soon, not with what you've done. Come on."

The path to their resort is neither long nor short, half-paved, but all too distinct in its direction. True platitudes pour down with every step he throws up. As they reach the summit, Saps takes the last step, and the first. Flux is already looking at him.

"Thanks for helping."

"Can't say no to a friend, can I?"

Saparata is always the first to betray their closeness. He is always the first to come back. In this circle of circadian toils and joys, he knows that they'll never change. This is forever.

Saps leads them on with new additions to the schematic, to which Flux swiftly refutes with all the technicalities of Luminaran architecture. He calls him a study for that. Where they start from there, they spool into light givings of heavy worlds, like the theory that Flux wrote is nothing more than just that, them in the crunch of siliceous sanctuary.

Arguments stand tall. They face it all together, even divided with their polarity: the optimal way to build up to where Ish resides, how Southern varieties should flower best in what conditions, and questionable dreams of using snow for watchtowers that Saps defends for the sake of it.

Every day, the sandstone stacks. With each breath shored up, Saps becomes more and less aware, his respirations altogether pausing when he does. He counts how long Flux is there, until his lungs give out and he gets trouble for delaying his retorts. That innumerable day of days, Saps learns more about Flux. That he waits to be answered, and that he doesn't wait to be heard. That he runs his hands across the sky like he breaks waters for his theory to will away the belief of reality. That he does stage theatre in his tune, latent as they are in their allotted times around fire, and nowhere else. For Saps, he poses just a little more, but there is a strange, gratified difference in the animation of his fingers pulling idealism at the bays of Saps' head.

Variation, in its sameness, entrances him, so that too many nights are spent with the bricks in his hands and not on the pillars. His fingers become numb from the weight, unfeeling of anything but Flux's guardian help as a replacement. In the same vein of gilded rocks and smiles wiped by debate, they spend an entire day cleaning out the beach they had first destroyed in their dawning. The hole-waxed rocks build up only when Flux touches them, hand linked to his own, as though he has become the only conveyor of worlds to Saps.

Cohabitation is not easy, but at their least, they are at ease. Evolution evolves itself in the tors they graft of themselves, capering down the slopes with entropic bearings too fast to change in its entirety. Saps finds that luck is more golden when it's darker, scar-lipped to spit out concise teases that he throws back with his own senseless exaltations. No amount of diamonds can prise away the incompleteness of Saps, for Flux to deprive him of every wrong thing that sits on the skyline. They are the only ones left to be wrong, together.

Flux talks at him more often than with him. Somehow, Saps finds that he'd take this half of a whole over the whole of a half function he'd walked away from at the Summit. To some possibility, Saps has his own theory on how they revolve, bridging restoration with abolition. A realish notion will become itself following their pantheon days, should the cycle end in a memorial and not a meeting hall.

Then there is the omission. Illogical, a waking part that keeps Saps' eyes open, and keeps them only open, dreaming. His thoughts lean in on themselves, dividing to divisions in the mirror looking at itself, never used. Never sought. Always barren.

Some cycles after restoring the shore, they graduate from long hours spent aggravating the land for its parts, to aggravating each other more on an assigned basis. These instances come and go anywhere, but one sits on a single line with no verses. They tame the silence, sedate, leaving patterns in palms that Saps will only later recall in its absence. Fire lays siege on black rinds, its arson taking in rare quietude for their usual creation. Should the heat dissolve, they fill it with their own, pressing glares and inured pads of fingers to temples. Flux speaks another border topic, his hostility diluted by the prospect of Southern Island dominion, and whispers phantom calls about ecological degradation. Aperion, he says, only one word. Saps listens, his view of respectable nations corrupting like the forms of age old Southern willows. At the end, he simply says that Flux gives him grief.

"Right." Flux laughs, luminary. "Good."

"Talk less." Saps' thumbs trail down to the corners of Flux's mouth, drawing them up so he can flip a new page to fit more of them on. He entombs pearly fangs in memory, then the tiniest jut of scar, then feels for the divide between in and out, the border to an entirely different language. One of three stays on his mind. One more. Just one more.

Flux's jaw dips to speak. He doesn't, articulation suspended in clamshell eyes, an outward stasis for all the thought roiling behind. In Flux's theory, he won't get to ever see it.

"Actually," his hands drop to coated thighs, stroking. The muscle clenches. "Talk more."

Saps would still drag up the sun to see the rut of his morning glare. There is a novelty in his delays of response, slowly blinking and uprooting the just-planted garden bed. Inexorable unions of flesh follow. An invariable circle of lesser than peace, greater than Saps' demoted ideals loops around. It shouldn't fit, but it does.

One more. Just one more. There is no intoxication so clean, so placid. They are the sea with how they base their corrosion over land, stamping their propensities into folklore of their own. Saps and Flux. Page two, no addendum to write studies about. No study at all, only this or that. A secondary project, a third afterthought. Tail ends of ancient allusions cited, new ones lathed into another frequency, broth upon shore. A gentle weight on their tongues.

"They look beautiful. Should we move an entire field over there?" Saps doesn't point anywhere. They both know of the bunched hills hidden beyond the high rise of the meeting hall. Less with life. Never barren. Not here, under their sky.

"What a living insult to this lovely mangrove swamp that you've ruined." He rips an allium from the dirt, raising its head above his eyes. Vibrancy shines through that dark, unreachable place behind his retinas. The discovery that it besmears Flux's hues light up a needy child in the pit of Saps' core that he has come to raise between their bond.

"You'd put them there, for what? To chase away the sea?" Flux continues, their violets shifting to mismatch. "Alliums are boring. I prefer figs and those of the family Cactacae. If you really want to stick to the theme, try ninebark."

Uppity little bitch. "We don't need any cacti. You're already sufficient."

Flux sniffs. "Yeah, whatever. If you're going to install these fluffy little peonies, no. At least choose something tall to match your resort. Character, Saps. Character!"

"You have such a special taste."

"I have the best taste," Flux corrects.

Saps shoots up, then stops. He slaps his arm in compensation. "The view up there needs some other shade, than, to quote, femur white and a future of judiciary horror. This is a resort, not a coffer! Plus, purple marks you." A reckoning smirks up. "I think you deserve a little acknowledgement for helping me build one pillar in total."

It's Flux's turn to shoot up, affronted. Saps rises with him, and for the strangest interval, they bore into the umbels. Yet, Flux's eyes siphon light more like cadmium paint than alliums— he was right once again. He leaves it in omission with all the other non-truths that pick up.

"Thank you. For that beach."

"I didn't create it."

"You were there."

Flux says it likes it's simple. "You came. Don't keep gratifying me."

Penance to anything is friendship with this inscrutable fool. Friendship is a design he can't read, not with him. They build up despite that.

For a moment, Saps thinks that it will happen, their deepest embrace. Rib against rib. Heart on heart. The organ, more than just that, plucks up with jumping, discordant notes.

Flux shoves his arms away. "Alright, whatever you want. You can excise the soil with the most shrivelled dandelions you'll find, even."

"Oh, you little…"

Alliums toss out of their way, their forms pressing bizarre welts into the field. Even when Saps is out of breath, he never stops, carving out the heel of his hand in Flux's sternum to feel his own notes. He can only describe them as elegant, but etiolated.

Flux, upside, reaches skyward, tracing light away into silver seams. His thumb marbles against Saps' eyelids, closing their anthels up to wintry touch. Saps takes in another, but he is made to be observe, not be observed. The tussling restarts, defiant.

"Ow! Hey, stop. That's enough. That's enough!" For all that Flux knows how to aim where it hurts, Saps has the physical advantage. Their fights never last long, presaging the next and the next.

As they always do, it ends in their still embraces. They collapse in the massacre, where they've built shapes of themselves in flying perianths that scald a memory on the horizon.

"Whatever you want, whenever," Flux repeats, lying on his side to stare beyond him, forgoing the skyline on the sea. He searches for another beyond the lands instead. "I'll always come."

Saps follows in the opposite direction, to pin his sights on a purple parapet that he can't hope to walk the world on. Were he to meet him on the same circle of an ether, they'd surely collide. Shoulder against shoulder. Arm battling arm. Hand on wrist.

His thoughts walk in circles around Flux. Saps knows only this, as he'd know any other fundamental truth about the world. The sky will hold up. Flux looks at him, neither history nor legend; not those leaders who goad death. They are here to be the domain itself.

At their summit, Flux has yet another word to throw into the wind.

"I admit, of course, that there's always a bigger want." Flux's attention falls back to him, turned cosmos. "Well, I know what you most want."

"Oh, how ominous of you to know my food cravings." Saps drifts off into chuckles. "How about you go get me what I'm thinking of right now?"

Saps pretends to joke, but he can't tuck away the unmoderated reality that shows on Flux. He was wrong in holding up an allium to this border beast. And borders vanish, to the effect that they were never there to begin with. They both know of this fact.

Still, the world holds. This thing they have is only epoxy. The subset, the ancient divider of myth into chapters. About epoxy, it demands base. Saps wouldn't be without it, and he knows nothing more. Nothing of the addendum, that bleak fog the apostate had snarled of standing on the table, even exists as a concept.

They still have space on the page. Saparata reaches to define it, to break the separation of silence. "Even if the sky falls?"

Flux closes his eyes. "Even after that."

Ten evenings later, when he sits on the unfinished eaves by his lonesome, he learns that this choice will be his last. "Why come?"

Flux sits with a proper kind of art. This one is confined, a wary witness in how he looks at Saps as though there is a schism between creator and creation. "I had to."

There should be a mutual link between them. Fluixon should know when to come and go in waves. He does, tapering along Saps' back in circles, within larger circles of motion. Already, Saps feels the gavel drop.

"Listen." Flux sighs, set at a distance. "I don't know if you've heard the news, but things have been getting tight over yonder."

"Where?"

"Everywhere. Not to mention there." When the other Island is brought up, Flux becomes strange. He was strange at the Summit, lisping fiction that resembled language. Saps doesn't want to think about it.

"You wouldn't bring this up without a reason," Saparata says. Saps, meanwhile, slants the words together so that they pulse as one. "What do they want me to do?"

Reality places itself down, as if the space around their beings had ever been buoyant. Saps will fall before he allows himself to be chased to the skyline. Saparata will tear away to hold collective fate by the reins.

Then it ends. "Not you. Me."

"They want you to go to back to Luminara." Saps tears away first. "I get it. I do. I'll be waiting."

Flux goes noxious, that femur-dry Aperion's property willowing on his brow. "Saps, don't forget that I'm Pleiades. Lifeblood of Luminara, the nation who so foolishly built at the doorstep of their nest! I'm going."

Total distillation of conflict eases out of his shock. The topic has crawled back up, and his mediation with it. "You don't have to justify yourself to me," Saparata says, before he can actually speak.

Fluixon assesses him, like it will be the last time he'll ever see the texture of Saps' hair, the dust on his clothes, and the unerring statement in his voice. "I'll be back soon." Gone he was.

Saps tries to reverse it, although he doesn't have to. Like every other mark he leaves, Flux burns a shape on the skyline. No matter where, he sees Flux in every detail, like it is the last time he will ever; the empyrean attire, his sharp flick of purples, the tick of a ribbed smile. A woman stands by him, nodding in turns. Saparata recognises her: Lady Seraphim of Tricolor, second only to the Queen Jophiel.

He does not think about polychromes. He does not think colour at all.

To patch up the air, he sits on the cliffs as if they are easels, and he the blank canvas. One singular pattern traces on his palm, phalange and not at all touch. This silent ritual sails in circles, like a boat on the ocean chasing itself.

Saps' brush isn't a feather. He chisels dereliction before he remembers where his bed lies.

Another day breaches. He sets down the candlesticks, thumbing their stems as if they can let him hold the flame instead. He presses his ear against the sky to listen, even when he doesn't want to. Scrawlings of Aperion emerge. The Commonwealth. Tricolor. A reverb, parchment rough, makes its rounds south.

[Page 10]

Everything, even the most bitter suffering, has intrinsic aesthetic value.
One can conceptualise this by imagining their life being constantly watched for entertainment...
...which, with Ish flying around, is easy enough to do.

Luminara evades him by will, but a line between two points is still a relation.

Another day breaches. Saps paces down the limbos, drained of thought. Aperion. The sand here bogs with Southern Island silt, crying their broad strokes into the sea. Aperion. At the fore of night sneers a gutted silence, their shapes like lisps reaching for language. Dream fills the cove. Moving forward is all too easy, but not moving from. Aperion.

He walks until he begins to miss the paves of Flux's shorthand, scrawling figmented meanings into the sea of Saps' sedate palm. Not Aperion, Yggdrasil's Guard. A gallery of icons, yellowed by maritime draft, singe into the long column down. He keeps kicking sand over fists and manacles, their anger imposed behind a fortress of fonts. Eventually, Saparata returns to his own fortress, the sandstones stacked in a font that he can't scrawl onto his palm.

Paradise? Prison? Solitude? Loneliness?

If only Flux could write the study for him.

Sworn to beyond the border, Flux is elsewhere, anyhow. The how is reality, one of three. Flux, who defines events with predicated wit. Pleiades, whose allegiance belongs to a council that will unite them all.

And Fluixon, at the Summit. World eater.

[Page 16]

The desire for peace takes its enemy for war.
This potential is tied to 'irrational', 'chaotic', free actors.
Only freedom, and always freedom, comes with chance of disrupting order.

He thinks again, their fictions curling in their claws to rake trial onto the basin of his mind. Those darkest moments froth at him until they are all nimbus, diffusing into thin ambiguation, sky-high.

Without another person to occupy the space, the meeting hall is no meeting at all, only partings scorched on its pristine shires. They've belonged to creation for so long that the home is only half now, its scaffolds turned to skeleton and its anatomy in silica rather than gold.

For where actual gold stores, Saparata finds it like diamond. Gold on the ringlets, arm cuffs slapped with weather and faces lined with more sun than the sea has soaked. In how he's shaped the world, the concept of a neighbour eludes him at all. A single name in a single letter of many, however, inherits the bay.

A chest-plated rogue tips her sword at him. "What are you doing out here, poser boy?"

Saparata's combat ability coils up, but isolation betrays him. "Oh, come on now. I'm the one who owns most of this island. You guys only park your boats here east."

"Park our boats?"

The crews part for a toned foreman. All the while, 'hermit' flings between their pipes in astonishment.

A clue curls on the mast. Fleet Master… "It's Ciarán, buster. And, you're on Freehaven shores." The wheat stalk between his teeth chews at his grin. "Welcome to the Pirate Republic. How did you get here?"

Saps' attention darts between the thieves, each of them bearing parrots on their shoulders. Some even wear eye-patches, cocking their beaks at him in curiosity. "I know who you are, just… you know. Got lost thinking."

"What could you possibly be thinking about that requires to you trot to the Void and back? Come on, drink's over here. Don't miss what we've got to celebrate."

"Celebrate what? My arrival?"

Ciarán bites out laughter that leaves holes in the air. The end is abrupt. "Nah, not really. If it makes you feel better, we'd have captured you on sight, but you're our landlord, yeah?"

Just behind him, a pirate wearing a gilded tricorne snorts loudly. No one shoots him looks; he must be the second in command, or whatever Pirate order ordains a high rank to be.

Something like the sun blazes up his throat. "You know what, sure."

He already knows the what. There's the matter of rediscovering the how. Shaken by a garish colour in his veins, he trembles up with declarations of "yarr!" and fumbling stories about Harbourbloom, with its gullet full of Arthonian goods.

Saps talks with Pascalos, who was the one that expressed his disapproval of him. He learns about the anatomy of a vessel to its every plank. By the time he stumbles away, a colt overfed, various wood types and their uses pervade him over anything else.

Luminara doesn't often use boats, not after their relocation.

"So, we've not only parrots, but Pete as well! Good plundering all around." Ciarán slams the slosh down, listening to Kotic elbow a secret at his Quarter Master. "Anything else you want to know about us in particular?"

Saps swallows down a hiccup, bowsprit lanterns dancing across his vision. "What do you think about the Al-Quarasina Pirates?"

"Aye, I'm a fan of all pirates—" he smiles that familiar smile, "—unless they try to plunder my booty…"

Sensing that his talk-mate will launch into another tale if he doesn't intervene, Saps croaks out the most unrefined, intoxicated chortle he can. An ignoble yawn pursues.

Pascalos feints raising an eyebrow at him, before resuming to all the ways he'd flip the pockets of the Commonwealth members dry.

Now, or never. "Yeah, but here's a real question. Do you know anything about—"

As all parties do, interruptions arise.

"Captain, Captain, I'm a little low on gold! Oh, Captain, Captain, Infernus is getting bold!" They crack out more shanties, illustrations of netherite and inter-island trade with some 'mafia' being openly tossed about. Again, Saps doesn't want to know what substances they are on. The Cartel happens to be in convenient waters.

The Fleet Master watches with complete adoration, twisting up a painting of strange, wild joy on Saps' vision. He does the same in turn, ignoring the tubers in the pit of his chest that have grown instead of sprouts. Their flowerings aren't even purple, the sky torn into mirrors of the sea. Blue. It reminds him that there is a world full of love out there. Fluixon was wrong, wrong, wrong.

"Sorry, you were saying something?" Ciarán turns back to him.

Above him, the clouds begin to swim in shoals, darting shadows of blue. The sun that trickles down feels like those waters beyond the border with how they bask wrongly on his face. "He's wrong, but he still means something. Right?" Saps lets loose. "I don't know what he's going to do. To be honest, it scares me."

A drunken hitch of breath escapes him. Ciarán's smile falls.

As all gatherings do, and the world he's forgotten how to touch does, it goes on. Contentless silence thins between them. When Ciarán speaks, it's with a boast that somehow teeters away from sanctimony.

"Mate. I don't know who you're talking about, but you need to leave that cargo behind. Pronto. Unpredictable stuff ain't good." The furrow in his brow deepens, but as all Ciarán is, his ease washes up once again.

"Look, we may be pirates and all, but we've got our own ways of staying on top. You need to do the same." He draws crosses on his arms in devotion, like treasure itself. "See? Wealth. Fame. Power. Easy! Just get rid of the barnacles."

Ciarán slaps his back, choking shock between Saps' ribs. "Thanks," he wheezes out, ashamed. Somehow, the feeling is the most he's ever felt since then. "Really."

[Page 12]

So, we have our metaphysical critique of values…
…what are we supposed to do with it?

Chairs scrape up, one preceding the rest. "Alright lads, how about we hit the hay for the night? Can't get the rest of those Arthonian goods without staying sharp!"

Great rumbles of wry adulation erupt. The image that shudders on his eyelids shouldn't be so familiar. Saps' head lolls on the table, undone.

"Hey," his friend says in a greater hush, gently shaking his arm. "I'm heading back to Harbourbloom. This'll be us for the hour, so, it's been nice knowing you."

"Don't go," he nearly says.

"You don't have to justify yourself to me," is what slips out from the froth of his mind. "I get it. I really do."

The sun will seep back in for every step he takes towards his quarters, only one of four. Their belongingness keeps dividing, but he brushes against the char marks of a hope that lights on the bowsprits. Salts of the air gather at his shoulder. They burn, failing him.

It all walks back to Flux. Three of one, and the borders couldn't be clearer. He wonders why they all meld together, anyway. He wonders why his friend's eyes dawn brighter than the glow of parapets, the grin of outsiders, or the rest across the space he calls a meeting hall.

The days all talk their topics. He chews on raw cod for the sake of it, spitting their springy bones out and gagging. Initials are carved on the married tree, their boughs bracing mangrove and dark oak. A shape in the sky moves with him, their horns baring down like a wary halo.

He doesn't touch the remaining sandstones.

Saparata finds rest on the real parapets, refusing to look at where the sky meets the sea. He leans his entire weight forward, as if reality will come to slant over in that motion. Moving from the parapet doesn't happen, not for a long time.

The sky darkens to cadmium. He circles back. Thinking of the words he burned into a hasty scroll, tucked in an abandoned flagon on the table, is all too easy. On his palm, he rebuilds his message from the light of coughed out sconces, patching fonts that tear with desperation. Over, and over, he does this in circles, until his finger will fall off entirely.

He doesn't want to study himself anymore. Philosophy, as real as it may be, stashes in the sconce's maw, both ways incomplete. One day, it will burn. The fires have already been snuffed out, so he doesn't touch them in his passivity. Sleep guards him in one arm, its devotion sailing off while it drinks dews of raining nightmares. Summits. Luminara. Fluixon.

Staying awake is always easier.

When his friend returns, he will have the study of others that are not Saps. It only pleads to wonder if they've both forgotten the charts of their skin. They won't lie wayside in that petal coffer on the tors, or wring bamboo into structure, spitting tricks while smiling with the same corners. A muscle of difference is still another border gained.

Conviction earns him. If it comes to be, Saps will sculpt each step out all over again, marble and eternalised.

A splash hollows past the fog, altogether unusual. In many of the Southern parts, fog thickens to a replacement of space, hiding even its mangrove depths. Here, on the shallower banks, a film of white mist settles on the most repressed of days.

Soleprints force their shape into the compact of the ground. Saparata feels the ton burdening his front before he sees the trail that leads to him. "Oh. Hey."

Fluixon draws back, an entire wall of tide. Saps takes notice of the active ring to his eyes, their edicts further stamped in the crest of his lifted mouth. He sees the red of his gums, their angry fists holstering on toothed weapon. Fear, for whom, picks at the rabbit's foot of his lobes. He sends it back.

"Have you listened to Luminara?" He grabs the hem of his own lapel, before snatching his touch away.

Saparata's lips shape around a thing. The air frights away, then clouds back in.

"Did you know? What they did to me?" If desperation could exist on Fluixon at all, this was it. An architect that could make even fear afraid, and the fog naked. "I'm not— I've been through this before. Ish." He runs his left hand on half of his face, fretting saltwater on what should be a comb of heat, lazy jokes posted between smoke filled lungs. Specimens fed to the fire, too charred to be called food. Saltwater with Saps. Everything blackened to heath, alive.

"Is it war?"

A variation astorms Fluixon. Another storm: none at all. "They demoted me."

"I know you only want the best for everyone." Saps thumbs the corner of the missive, blurting out whatever he can. Mediate. "You're unpredictable. They get that— they're scared of you. But you came back."

Fluixon does that squint of his, assessing. Someone who may not know him at all would think it to be disdain. Saps knows better about the gentle tick in his cornea, their inner lists filing down to a beauty of simple complexes. It stops. "You lead me astray."

Saps always walks. To that place, pallor and marked clean by border, he refinds column on supple arm, singeing it with his own patterns. His words come out in a whisper. "I only asked."

Time leaves their grasp. Saps and Flux are immediate, perched on the outcliffs, not yet waxing each other with their molten touch. Their words run out of cellars, eager to tile over distance. What means everything is how Flux's head lifts to the expanse above the skyline. That, too, they wax over with different variations of themselves.

"When they die, they become other. It's their fame that glorifies them, but it's their ambition that deifies them. So, we have Admins like Solev, who used to be of the Snow State." Flux reads the lines on his face. "Ask the cosmos why some become and some don't."

"Do the Admins watch?" Saps asks, even though he already knows the non-answer. He asks to hear Flux talk. Just one more time and he can keep himself up at night on the sheets instead of walking the isles.

Flux's lip curls up, showing gums that set rather than riot. "Who knows? I'm just a guy with wants."

"Don't deprecate yourself. You're amazing." Saps, for this new, inexplicable myth of a reason, hides the corner of his mouth under the dark of night. Casual, he needs to justify. Never barren.

Flux stares at him. "You're right," he says. "I don't disappear."

Saps says nothing to that. His heart plucks up with jumping, discordant notes. They thump over the desert heat in his cavity, persistent waves of fictitious emotion digging up memory. Space becomes a tightness that shrinks with every battering palpitation.

So, they're talking about it.

"You left me." Disparagement doesn't touch his tone. Anger is also absent, quoting only the faint thrum of chords. Some kind of gap chews out lisps into language, deforming their contents back into omission. "You promoted me. I had to wipe the blood off my boots. Some of it even got in my mouth. And I had to speak with that mouth the next few moments, on that platform, away from your still warm corpse. It was the sand, Saps. We were in the Desert, but they entombed you in the sea, because I couldn't stand being on the same land as you."

[Page 27]

So, we need a state.
But, we need a state that is focused not on order, and does not support freedom through neglect.
We need a state that genuinely cares for and materially assists the projects freely chosen by its citizens.

I'm sorry. I'd have done it again. It turns out that falling is so brief, did you know? I'm sorry. I'd have done it all over, over the failed plan and my failed Presidency, and the— I'm sorry.

"I think you have a plan for everything, right?" Saps reasons. He doesn't say the norm behind that. Anything will fall before the previous page is restored.

"Not for that." Fluixon's gaze drops to the sand. "I was unprepared."

The next best turn rounds out, air thin. "If I have to die, I'm gonna make sure—"

"You're not dying here," Flux intercedes. "I refuse it."

Laughter bursts out of him, toneless heaves that finish over each other. "Now who's the Admin?"

"As I said, I only have a single vision to see with." Fluixon then spits out the aged axiom of these deities like it is primal: "Neutral eyes are all eyes."

His comparison is clear.

Their hands lace, for poets to say that their bones could fuse together and become a living domain of teasing, fighting repetitions. The moment is too short, but bundled together with the carved out mountain, it feels like their incompletion.

Flux bunkers his way into another possession of knowledge. His voice airs out, their grander hills muted by stillness, leaving only resoluteness. Fluixon. Saps' ears cradle it, but the potency of the moment elates him over anything else. He barely snags on with his own responses, water for the stores of Fluixon's mind to sail on. Between them, they are act and react.

Saps thinks they could live in this time forever. Saparata doesn't think at all, but he sees with eyes scheduled by nightfall. They keep open, but they don't inhabit.

Any other words remain Saps on the pavement to a new tomorrow, another fascinated loop. Seven children of the sky regard them back with controversial distance. Their polyradiances fascinate him. Ever the orator, Fluixon guides his hand to point at each legend, naming them as individuals. Then, he says the asterism as a whole, its name anything but casual in tenor.

Saps doesn't touch upon it. He talks about borders, and Flux listens by quitting them.

"Did you know? A study from the Cass Coalition and an astronomer from Aperion are at each others' throats over what distance Pleiades truly is from here. They call it the Pleiades Distance Controversy."

"I didn't know." Saps doesn't hide this smile. Fluixon knows so many rights. He also thinks too many wrongs. Opposers can't coexist, so Saps tucks it into yet another state of omission. "Go on, suitor of events. Show me this scientific myth."

Flux reaches out, hand brushing against distance.

"I'm sure you don't want the numbers. Well— I'd say that both uncertainties are low." Fluixon's gaze invades the open expanse, detached. "I guess an astute summary of the convention would be that… hm. Relatively speaking, one of them is closer than the other."

The sky is only air. Today, he cannot set his chisel into its smoke-fed vessel, painting across just-roused whereabouts with another sand particle from a falling interval. Ignored. Those are the steps he makes, falling forth and not moving by himself.

He falls too fast to the inset on the paper floor. Aggregate rocks flick out of his approach, single-minded in their entropy. This is freedom: not the walks, not the aphonic fire. Just not.

Depletion outwears itself. Saps falls down another flight, legs without mass. The copper workshop clusters around him, begging at the foot at the agora for constitution. A metal hand controls the mounting rod, wanting to hold a deluge that won't be there.

Fluixon scrapes off patina from the lightning rod, hatchet gleaming in the mothy light. "What is this?"

"Copper oxidisation," he replies dutifully. Their words come out as print, lined. Not voice.

He frowns. "I thought you were good at upkeep. So— why hasn't the agora finished yet?"

"Is that what it is?" Saps murmurs. Fluttering things have crawled back to nest in cartilage, ceaselessly laden by self-referral. They make nest in his lobes, hexcomb and congested. "I've been occupied."

"Speak of the tracks I've found on the lower cliffs, then. To my knowledge, desire paths don't exist unless they've been walked over several times." The minute rise at the bag of his eyes tells it all. "A minimum of fifteen, to be exact. What have you been doing?"

Fact, by Flux. Aperion imperalises the Southern Island. They have been known to disregard ideological possession, laying ruin to the shoreline forests. Saps hasn't seen them, but Flux had sketched up a thunder he'd spied on alternate waters. They watched as ink bled down to ossified rind and femur roots.

Petrified. "…Nothing of your—"

"Exactly!" Fluixon blusters out. He circles back to the new myth, a shape of erratic algorithms that move pieces of the air out of his way without giving back any of that flat, breathy laughter. Here; his left hand across his face, half obscured.

"…interest," Saparata finishes.

"Interest in what?" A counsellor of Pleiades returns. "Saparata, I'll need you to delineate every single action you've taken instead of building the meeting hall, starting from the moment that I left. I trust that you've been productive."

Saps breaks, and his foundations slant forward. Forward, until he can't tell what climate combs on their cheeks, except for the shores riding on his chest. They gain fitful periods. "Don't use that tone with me. I'm not a criminal."

Fluixon's gaze errs, entirely implausible. He is Pleiades, elsewhere, eating worlds with the shadow of a status he once had. "I don't take in liabilities. This is too fast."

"I don't understand. You're going too fast." Saparata tries to flatten the creatures that flutter off his tongue, frolicsome and dispersed. He can't crush the shiver of their wings. They are elsewhere, to silent omission. "You've been away. I've been walking. The coastline's changed without you."

"Don't dress your words." Those purple eyes flick back, as if they just hadn't trained on him at skyrise to skyfall. "What else?"

Algae swims through. Saparata motes out shoals, shores, and the colour of the sky. He talks about the candlesticks. They haven't been lit more than once, the first so he knows that their bodies are alive. That, he doesn't tell Fluixon.

With every word comes comprehension. Saps watches Fluixon calcify, drafting responses, as he always does. This time, the places arrive from are legalese.

"It has to move on, yeah?" The illusion dries out, another figment belonging to night intervals. Flux looks back, stolen, never washed away. "We have to be done."

"You're right," Saps confesses. "I'm too… too far into my head."

They break off into flight up the platform. When Flux asks where houses the mangrove planks, Saps points to the chest behind the far right pillar. He watches him climb the scaffolding, himself immobile.

What has just preceded scrapes up cinder in his legs, tinging work with feeble hands at the base of the last uncut pillar. All that Saps ought to do is try, direct, plead. One more time. Time does that for him, snacking on his notice.

"Saps." Flux's moonlit face frowns down at him from the eaves. "What are you doing this time?"

He blinks at him, not quite catching on the details of those crescent scars. "Building."

Flux opens his mouth, but whatever that he should be stays. "You're doing a poor job," he throws out instead. The man has already disappeared beyond the rafters.

It's a fearless attack, the brickwork of their routine. Saps doesn't know why his hands go cold, or why his lips freeze over. Most of all, he doesn't know why he can't carve into its marbled creation. For all that his vision blanks, he can't place the colours in their right places.

His legs tell him to sit down. Saps thinks he will lie against the border for just a moment.

Flux's men are back, marching up the stairs in uniform mission. Hiding behind assertion lurks a stillness that can't be plied from Saps' hindbrain. He watches them shift into predefined motions, one after the other, catching each other with fractal pauses that tell tales. Saps doesn't point out what he notices. There is no one to relay these tiniest of acts to.

"Hey, Snowbird," Saparata approaches the back of a tricorne, decked out below with purple finery the precise hue of Flux's eyes. The dual resemblances jar him, halting his advance.

Snowbird's head snaps up, still mangling the gutters on the side of the roof. "Hey. Do you need something?"

That persistent attention slows down his response. A strange interval occurs, where they both see in mutual directions without meaning. There must be meaning, Saparata thinks, in how the world doesn't feel like it's paused, but how strange the feeling of resumption is.

It casts itself into omission. "No. I'm just checking. How's Luminara, by the way?"

A second interval seems as though it will restart. The tricorne hat swallows Snowbird's face in place of an action. "Everything's fine over there. Gotoga and I did a lot of humanitarian work at Fluixon's behest. We've managed to amend connections with Shima's Legacy, even."

"That seems impossible, after all that complaining Flux did at the start." Saps chuckles. "I'm glad, though. Sounds like you had a good time, for what little you'd get from being in the centre of politics."

Snowbird nods once, head already bowed to the welding. Fluixon's friends often do, their brevity dependant on factors that Saps can't hunt down. Today, it seems that Snowbird doesn't have anything to say, his responses clipped. It must be the politics.

When Saps turns away, Fluixon gives him pause. His notation befalls on Saps, contrary in its direct evasiveness. An entire sea separates them, with Flux putting stoppages on cloudy flagons, their messages intercepted by some halted immersion. It all shatters as he moves, too alike an Admin proceeding pelagic walls of water.

Beside him, Snowbird ushers his bare hands away. Saps watches him part for a second, pulled by Fluixon's election-winning stride.

A hand falls on him, patting off dust from his shoulders. Fluixon smiles, close-mouthed. "What would you do to take it back?"

"Give it." Saps is always the first to admit. "I'm not building the other section of the roof for you."

In the distance, Thomas pushes down the napes of his comrades, though he is the one to look. The moment, too, is passing, amassing weight on the voluntary blades to their throats. Saps has to call them persistent.

"Oh, it's only a hollow gable roof. Not that hard." Flux lets the tool hop between his hands. "We're working as one, anyway. Don't complain."

Just as quickly, Saps experiences Flux. The path of thin smile as it cranks up, battling storied scars. Playful expectance. Those theories, constantly cascading through an inner stratagem whose channels he doesn't know the shape of. Saps wants to be the wave that laps them up.

He sighs. "What do you want?"

"I'm not asking for anything this time, nor have I ever. I just want to know about you." That idiot smile again. Flux is reaching for something. Saps won't give it to him.

Saps is made to reach instead. The chisel is deposited into his palms, fingers closed in on its sharper edges. Fetches of that non-touch tickle at the bulwark of his fingers. "Already? I'd thought you would keep it for another few nights to torment me."

Staring at his clenched fist, Flux doesn't respond. Behind his tight mouth, his teeth set. Saps is always watching.

"Come on." He turns away, tired from the conversation. "We're constructing this 'agora' today or never. Are you going to help, or will you be one of those sleazy Tricolor architectural cheats you carped on about earlier?"

Flux tilts his head up in that specific angle, speech ready. "The culture surrounding Tricolor is rather severe, especially pertaining to the self-actualised purpose of a civilian due to their occupation almost completely dictating their lifestyle. It's a rather flawed constitution if you look past…"

Saps watches the sky. Spring has come, and with it, an unfamiliar blue. He only knows white starts and purple ends. Blue doesn't match well with this domain's character.

"… its impressive stratification of sectors— though, that is a problem in of itself. There's a whole array of papers on that for your insularity, mind you. I'd suggest you watch your mouth."

Saps fixes his eyes on the rafters so that he doesn't roll them. "Showoff."

To the demise of their mutual productivity, Flux persists. "It's Mattel, actually, that you should be talking about. They're the ones lacking builders— for what? Constructing spa houses with all cherry wood?"

Now, he pivots around, already used to Flux's ending pillories. "Then why talk about Tricolor at all?"

Flux sings the cycle. "It's called intellectual discussion, Saps. I doubt you've ever heard of it, wanting to be holed up on this island and all."

Old folly claps up, hot in his chest, cherry pink. "You were the one digging holes for me. Logical fallacies? Fluixon has plenty!"

"You forget that I used to be Vice President." Flux actually rolls his eyes, moving to change the expressions on his viewing party.

Saps closes the gap, yanking on the just-ironed necktie that Flux always wears. Their eyelashes fight against each other. "You forget that I used to be President."

Lava runs through Flux's veins. His words print into Saps' cheek. "Not very logical of you to resign that way, is it?"

The feeling stunts. Theria has become blue, distant from the sand cycles ago. Mostly, its seismic displacement vexes him in its senselessness. "At least I don't base my right to feel over a twenty-five page protocol. What poor publication had to finesse that for you?"

"Excuse you, I handwrote that." Flux shifts, posing how a Calix citizen would for the grandeur of their hard work. They wait for one another to speak, pride inviting resignation.

Snowbird leans in to whisper something to Gotoga. They snicker.

"Don't question our leader's genius." Thomas intercedes in his passively authoritative voice. He heaves the last batches of wood onto the deck in neat stacks. "So what if they are?"

Saps doesn't miss the small uptick in Thomas' gait. He glares at what conspiring members he can. In synchronisation, they wave a hand as a proof of innocence, then resume hewing down components to their marrows. He lets it drop.

The moment turns to air, waiting for the next wave to populate it. He will sit at the helm counting away the hours for a coming voice to birth him an opus. Ashlar by slab. Pasting grout in the gaps. Epoxy resin, their platform.

Sometime amidst sunset, a person not all stranger to Saparata rocks up on the fringes. He lets the anthem of her voice play out in subconscious annotation, smoothing it over with forced normalcy. There is no only one diplomat. If Fluixon invites Lady Seraphim over, there must method.

Seraphim leans back on a particular tree with crossed arms, her foot stamped over where Saps had etched the pits of his soul on. She stares at him without rest. After a while of this half-tension, Hvy limbers towards him with cooked cod, burnt, and a pervasive interest in Tricolor.

"As for their central structure, I know that their Ladies and Lords can get protective. You've heard of Westhelm's Emperor, right?" Hvy towers over him, arms decorating his subject in mystifying pantomimes.

Saps nods along, the scaffolds sitting in his hands forgotten. "I'm pretty sure his name is Schpood. Schpood? Yeah. His paranoia is so crazy that it'll even cross borders."

"They're such close guards to their Queen that they're a whale's deal of sensitive towards their surroundings. Don't cross their Ladies in particular, I'm telling you!"

Hvy's insinuation isn't lost on Saps, but he accepts it. Fluixon always makes the right choices, save the omissions. He doesn't know them, those intervals where their gazes turn exacting, and their limbs lock up in wide, natural arcs, lining a mouth to script with.

The rest of the night goes by in this manual silence. By the time Saps straightens his spine over the last lutes of the pillar, the sun has already claimed the skyline, raising heat as the next great warrior. Seraphim is gone, her boat sunken into the skyline.

Already, Flux and his mates have displayed their efficiency with the roof. The rafters have almost disappeared behind angular steps of mangrove. Saps climbs up to feel the fresh grain of shelter.

"The Pleiades are too much trouble." He hears Flux on the ground, ramrod at the dias of his reanimation. The sun caves around him, the two never touching.

Thomas marches up to him. They vivify, gestures slung in different, wild arcs, as though they are blades themselves. A sharp nod is communicated.

"Keep suppressing the Shima and Bridge seats," Fluixon says to Gotoga. "We've got the backups if need be. When the time comes, be prepared for the turnaround."

Through languor, Saps thinks he hasn't ever fully seen the rawness pooling in Fluixon's eyes. No longer smooth, more thought than man. None of his stature can be described as soft, not like the practised hits he'd bestow on Saps in the parting of their touch.

Though Saps' eyes track the incongruence with struggle, he tunes out the conversation. It isn't his business to know what Flux says beyond their bubble. International conflict is an exchange he is already too occupied with. Pressing his body further against the flat of the roof's alcove, he lets the gaggle of their voices flatline notion. His awareness stretches to the slow draws of his breath, then with eventual sleep.

Somewhere in a paper thin reverie, he remembers the moment that divides silence. Flux. Always Fluixon. Some dreams are meant to be dreamed.

The world fills in reverse. Alliums pop out of flesh, their perianths indistinguishable from form. It is a herbaceous dream that stares at him with bulbous eyes. Saps wonders if this is how he sees Flux. He doesn't know anymore.

"What would you do to take it back?" detaches from the perennial.

A different Flux stands over him, his pallor jibed by reflective red shadow. The look on his face holds the feeling that he ought not to think or know at all. His words staunch like blood. "…not lucid at all, are you?"

Saparata can't bear to look at him. His focus fixes on the barren ground. Words travel through water, not of the easy kind. "What's this 'it'?"

"Nothing at all." Those boots blink closer. "Your life."

Saps has nothing to say. Logic upends its quotients, leaving him southerly. He can't take anything for fact but his own pestilence of a daydream that even he tries to blunt out.

"Everything," a stranger answers for him. "I accept no other restitution for being the tallest seat. I may want peace, but not just for me. This is my purpose now."

"You'll stay still? When the time comes?" Flux's hands are on his throat, caught between continuities both precious and dangerous. Both are flesh, petal. The touch feels like metal. Saps divides hismelf, to choose what mask they are wearing.

Dispute doesn't come, but they run behind his lips in polarity. To him, very few truths come to par with fundamental concepts like the sky. In the same reason, he wants to cradle this strange Flux by the neck too, and say that humans aren't just one unrippled, perennial expanse. They war. They argue, foot on table and waiting for deification. Saps will only follow.

"I'll be there," Saps promises.

"…alright. Up you get." Fingers slot in the divots of his ribcage. Bone meet bone. Solitude meet loneliness. "This is what you get for rushing things."

"Flux?" Saps murmurs. His tongue is thick with a sharpness that he can't spit or swallow, their acid figments eaten by the lack of air.

"Stop sleeping in random places. It's not a good habit to have." The voice scolds. "If you sleep at all, that is. I just think you're having your idle little peace thoughts with your eyes closed. Ish forbid."

To Saps, the maw that opens is a different wastrel of toxic. On his brow, another layer dies. Despite it all, he reaches to smear away the tension on Flux's own brow, thumbing along the bevels as though they are pages that can be read. His finger burns.

Above him, the image's mouth stretches. What a smile. "Fact. You can't see the ground from a pedestal you build around you, but you can't ever touch the sky either. You claim peace, yet you also claim freedom. Saparata does halves, doesn't he?"

"Shut up," he grumbles. "Have you done that? The… the…" He struggles to reach for the schematic, their lines distorted, dreaming maladaptive omissions. "All of that."

"I've done most, and soon, I'll do whole. Now's the time for hope." A world eater gazes down at him, their purple reticles eking out his statue of a body. "You were always talking about that, weren't you? This is for us."

A missive arrives into Saps' hands by the parrot of the Pirate Republic. It states only this, in writing trapped by haste:

Saparata, Queen Jophiel of Tricolor was assassinated by her former Lady, Seraphim. A Summit has to happen prompt at sunrise tomorrow in your meeting hall. We trust that you're ready.

Saparata isn't ready. The paper crimples, but his world has divined to the dark smudge on the fringes, where the side of a scribe's hand had rested right on a symbol of Jophiel. He doesn't even know painful it could have been.

The thumb tears through the page. He recalls her tenacity, her love for the minds, not the bodies of flesh and structure built to be fought on. Dispossession rules Tricolor, their assemblages now nothing more than a land of barren confusion.

This Island isn't only about the land.

Saps' shoulder burns.

"Hey." Flux's chin juts down into diamond, gaze pressed on paper. His weight is heavy, but none at all to grief. "It's been a while."

"She's not here. Don't say that!" A dark miracle seethes into flesh, throbbing at the caldera. The afterthought of touch has become igneous, while he can barely pluck out a word. "Jophiel," half a sob.

Fluixon studies him.

"It's been a while since the world closed off. About time we face the tide, haven't we?" That strange figment settles in Flux's eyes, the one that Saps ought to never know. He isn't willow, an ashen property to hatred. Fluixon is alive.

Saps' right to feel is a property to fear. He wants to blame, but not to know about it. For as long as they can share this mist of a mantra, never. "Even if the sky falls?" he reaches, weakly.

A leading thesis towers up behind Flux's face. He arcs out patent gesture, that the hours all but should know to be thoughtful. "It will. I trust that you'll meet a conclusion soon enough."

Before he can say anything, Flux falls into him. They mismatch in perfect shapes: trichomes on plants, a koi for the hook, animal trauma on a butcher's receipt. Between them, they are not for consumption.

The flame is warm. He almost doesn't want to snuff it out. Anxious shame creeps up his arms, for some philosophy he can't publish with his fractured misdirection. There isn't anything to do but sit on the throne of the present.

"Flux," his fingers stir whirlpools into darkness, "I don't want to do any of this."

"Saps," Fluixon utters, the name under tide. His touch handles, metal against sallow cheek. When he speaks, it is with the same crisp intrications. "I chose you for the Summit because I knew you had it in you. I wanted you there at the meeting with Aperion."

The sea turns to eventuality in their pause. From a fathom, Saps knows the theory. When they start, they stop events with their feeling. An inverse relationship for an inverse domain, their fields a trance to the world.

"The world has chosen for the both of us. You need to gather the leaders here. All of them."

[Page 8]

This nihilistic hatred of life born of the inability to accept the suffering inherent to it is called 'ressentiment'.
…

Archaeology proves to be a cult. Saps keeps gouging out the earth.

"Was this place ever going to be a resort?" Saps lifts off the brinal sting of myrrh, just enough to see the sliver of femur white underneath their feet. They, the architects of this; this. Soon, he will have to parade his ideal to the gallows.

One second passes. One sanctuary passes. Two Islands pass.

Flux is the first to draw back. His face is omission, the black gaps between Pleiades. "It's not yesterday anymore. Mercy will come for us all."

That is the last line in the script of Flux, framed by a bronze patina. They enamel an entire gallery of themselves, laced at the backs of each other, heads buried in fantasy. To say that the subjects would share the same is entirely a feeble debate.

The scaffolds of half a revelation collapse at skyrise. On return, the world steps into his domain, broken and resumed. At the fore of barren air, he can only be Saparata. Moderate. Supplicate. Officiate.

He hates this opposite of peace.

So unlike Fluixon, whose quips flow out smoothly, anxiety chirrs its rough pauses into this anomie. The canals of his ears cannot cradle their words. "Order," he calls again. Order isn't the offside thing he's learned to love with that man. "Everyone, calm down. Let's handle this one by one."

Animalism.

Aperion grips the wood so hard that it'll imprint. Alkaline. Commonwealth shouts back. Korulein. Voices. That being reduced is not the only sound Saparata hears ends him. Conspiracy bounces on his cold, mute lips in its own edict. "The assassination of King Wolfram of Arthon and Queen Jophiel of Tricolor. Is there any chance of a Conspiracy that's been going on?"

The nations pause in consideration. A stillborn response spins out.

When the sky falls, Saps wants to waste it all. An arcane reflex starts him off the page and away from the rains that pale his table. In his restitution, thought wipes.

Parting from the shade of the eaves, they call for his death, rising to meet him with laceration. This place, sanctuary had it been, shouts division, and he, to become the sordid language of history. He did it.

"He did it!"

Crests of hill slope down to jagged foe. Bevies of alliums lash out arms to reach against his own, as he touches down on a stranger of a domain. His hunters leer behind him, moving stone and breaking waters to get to him. They'll peel the teeth from his gums and twist his cranium into an artefact with their history making tools.

Saparata of Lonesome can't let them get to him. For this bare life they've bestowed him, he flees from outbreak. Places that they'll never reach amount to a line of zero, chasing itself in mindless circles. Criminal.

A new genus catches in his chest. There is no time to create or garden it out. No one wants to know. His legs won't stop for his mind as he thrashes into flipping tides. The sea accepts him.