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Act I: General exposition and introduction of the main characters: the audience applauds, rising from their seats in admiration, the lights go out.
The blow has fallen, sudden, like a divine spell. With dust and crackling, wounds, monsters against monsters—the classic special effects of tragedy. People's paralysis by revelation, the inability to quickly orient themselves— are the same tragedy.
The last day of Pompeii, 1833. This is a description of Bryulev's painting. For a moment, Rover seemed to think that Rhinascita was completely different. For a moment, Rover seemed to think that Solaris was an inhuman, unearthly place, in this pure new world, harbouring boundless possibilities.
The sky is torn apart. The heat of the scorching air is stifling. Every muscle in the body contracts in panic, the body—every cell—is filled with an all-consuming, indescribable horror.
The apogee of hopelessness.
A most vivid illustration, terrifyingly beautiful.
The spectacle seemed so unreal. The sky is torn apart—and this spectacle rings within him with irrational pride and admiration. The lines are a census of everything and everyone under a skillful hand, rough, like names shattered into crumbs. Not torture, but subjective idealism. A playwright without a play is delighted by the most brilliant creative daring, effectiveness, and anticipation.
Black, red, purple, black, red, blue. She remembers neither her own loneliness, nor how the other resonators arrived a little later. Came to help twice.
The sky is not torn apart. Bathed in white clouds in the dawn sun.
The sky above Septimont is orange-pink. Her body is ablaze.
Her muscles ache, her heart pounds, her thoughts are tangled in a hazy, sleepy haze—fatigue, exhaustion. Rover, disheveled and angry, exhales, relaxing her tense shoulders—her face, sharpened by anger, softens afterwards. She sinks into the parched grass, falling heavily, letting her wing disappear in golden sparks, renouncing its resonance, shuddering with silent laughter.
And all around there is silence, peace, wind. It seems like an eternity since it's been so peaceful here.
The cruel (un)fairytale of a black sheep in a white flock—of betrayal and a difficult life—can't be erased from her memory. The phantom pain from the body pierced through and through, the undiluted silver chloride in the pupils of a mortally tired familiar stranger, the paper cranes and the end of it all still can’t be erased.
Pawns with their destinies already ruined. It's unthinkable, utterly unthinkable to understand—fate doesn't belong to any of the living, thinking, or acting, and wherever you go, someone else's will prevails; you can't escape it as long as you continue to breathe.
Predestination is the destiny of everything; this isn't the classic belief in divine intervention, perhaps a manifestation of the God syndrome.
After all, everything that is material, everything that he created, everything that he loved with the love of a parent, loved just as she loves, but he condemned it to suffering will soon die.
Only this time, it's felt so much more vividly—a burning sensation in the chest, like the blackness of the Tide on the skin.
The gladiator doesn't shine brighter and more intensely with every movement, every touch, every screaming oath—he drowns in ink on parchment. He won't save Ragunna, or anyone in the area, he won't offer encouraging advice where the sky is mournful, dead souls drift, and the ruins of the Tetragon stand half-abandoned.
The events are fiction. The vessels of text and character traits are unreal, caricatures—an attachment to an image, and therefore they shouldn't be pitied. A sequence of conversations, several encounters, ruins, blackness, flowers, and a motionless, frozen body—that fake boy with a fake life, fragile and brittle, weightlessly light as a feather, smiles for the last time.
Avidius was here. But Avidius was not here anymore. Two diametrically opposed facts, the veracity of which she had no doubt, overlapped, forming something unclear and etched in her soul. Perhaps because he met death in its final form, not in its original? Had he become a man emptied to the core, of whom only the shell described remained? Had he led himself into the next world, not witnessing how his life was suddenly cut short?
Someone else's will—a bitter fate had decreed death for him. Avidius agreed to show her the way to the Hunt, initially choosing as his goal only the desire to help, finding a friend along the way. Avidius won't become king, he'll turn away, go off to wonder about the Creator, saying goodbye once and for all, but he'll ascend to heroism at the cost of his life. Does it really matter now? Rover remembers what will happen, remembers what destroyed him, how it broke him, how it hurt him beyond words, but to do anything in the face of an unattainable past is beyond her power. Isn't there regret? How can one let go of someone who never existed?
It's beyond the comprehension of Rover from the vanishing future. It's not tears that choke her, but regret that she couldn't remove the carnival mask of sorrow from the Creator's face.
"The world isn't all black and white, not all black and not all white," Angel squints in an obvious, silent hint, leaving flowers on a grave without a cross or a monument, without dug earth or funeral wreaths. "Look at that, the epitaph gives its all."
"And everyone will remember it, right?" She traces letters on the stone, scratching words in white. She becomes distracted—her calloused fingers gently caress the petals of a swall flower, white and still fresh.
"It looks interesting, yes," Galbrena rises from the ground, motionless, standing nearby for a moment, her boots drowning in violet.
She should find Cantarella, tell the others, perhaps notify them of the place of death so they can be properly escorted. She would be happy to strike up a farewell conversation with the wanderer, but these yellow eyes gleam—not a gleam, but an unbearably clear understanding: it's too late.
Certainly.
Because he essentially doesn't exist.
Because he will never return.
Rover shook her head and, in an unconscious attempt not to withdraw, left the stone by the spear planted in the ground. She closed her hot, heavy eyelids. Just for a moment, to finally catch her breath. Fatigue was taking its toll. Her thoughts, on the contrary, were briskly coming into order, bringing a long-awaited certainty—sincere gratitude. Nothing else. Saving a life could evoke no other feelings, and she knew no other way to express gratitude and farewell now, while the thought treacherously ricocheted off her eardrums, cut off too late by an effort of will.
Avidius is remembered.
He was part of all this. He wandered through the lines without order or distinction, as if they were written diagonally.
Avidius accepted the sacrifice.
Galbrena did everything as ordered.
Only this time the memory is more vivid—her chest burns as intensely as the blackness of the Tide on his skin.
Rover counts and invents lines, desperately holding images in his head—convincing himself to wait until sunset. She recalls the doubts of the strange, strange priestess, the broken mirror, the ghost that came from the dead; who would have known that the woman with the staff, the only one who offered a truce, would at some point perish from her own stubbornness and piece herself back together again, without losing a single lycoris in her image.
A hilariously stubborn last hope, more inconsolable than saving, comes into the night. When her own shadow disappears, Rover is left alone in faded, faded hues. The silence that reigns is not sepulchral, but absolute, empty—for several miles, not a single Echo, not an animal, not a bird can be heard running past not a raven with astonishingly intelligent eyes.
The air freezes in her lungs.
She discerns footsteps an hour or two later, but doesn't turn her head toward the sound, because she knows who she'll see long before the purple fabric of a cloak flashes at the edge of her vision.
Rose petals have a rusty, sweet scent.
The grass is crushed beneath his sandals.
"You can consider it my oversight," She says, regretting instead of greeting, clearly putting an apology into her words. "Because we couldn't save you."
His blue, inflamed eyes stare off into the distance, turning to a deep blue, clouded by black water. Oh silly, poor boy, why did you come? Naive child unable to stray from the path, you don't know that people really die, and you shouldn't be here, and your body is a lie, so why did you come?
"There's nothing to apologize for to a pawn," His voice is quiet and calm, his breathing even. A character on paper has no feelings, and therefore he can't have any, despite constant evidence to the contrary; it's not true, he's more alive than them all, and the pawn-he-thinks-he-is has taken on a lot of grief.
The Gladiator, the Harbinger, the youth who sees no imaginary world in his faith, a hero in books, embossed in gold or silver on the spine—she will gather the pages together, piece by piece, for this monster who values the (un)beautiful. She will gather the pages, rewrite them from memory with her own truth, offer her heart on the altar almost philosophically, almost poetically, and... Oh silly, poor boy, you realized too late that you are his phantom, his genius. Too late, Avidius, you realized that you were nothing; no matter how much you helped people, no matter how much you served and curried favor.
Twilight blurs the two of them. Rover glances at their shoes, not flinching, not shaking the goosebumps from her bare shoulders. She looks up, the face before her still recognizable. The fabric tingles, touching the warmth of a living body; she reaches out to him with fingers numb from need, wanting to bury them in his hair—and then falters, frozen in a broken, unfinished pose. Fear grips her almost tenderly.
"You are the sun, our sun, you shine brighter than all creation," She says, whispers, and repeats. "The sun."
“No,” His calm is immense, unearthly, like truth carved in stone. Avidius presses his lips together until they turn unhealthily pale, seemingly the same as before, with hot blood and a burning heart, yet he looks as if he’s not here at all. “Augusta is our sun, but... forgive me, forgive me, I shouldn’t have pushed everyone away".
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, forgive me, I’m so sorry.
His body doesn’t glow with an otherworldly scent, the wind doesn’t carry a putrid smell, and his skin isn’t earthy, without the purple scab on the right side of his face—Avidius is still the same . Avidius is the same as always. He sits down next to her on the grass, pulling his leg to his chest, grabbing it by the knee.
"I suspected it would be like this," She says quickly, sitting down next to him, side by side, and wants—really wants—to submissively stretch herself out in her palm, casually cling to his shoulders, drag him along, showing him how it all ended after that last smile. Perhaps her survivor's syndrome offends him, but she doesn't see the feigned anger.
"Unfortunately, I was written in so as not to live to see the climax." Avidius's smile is pure, sweet, but Rover doesn't look at him any longer, she can't, even though she sees the dark forest and glowing flowers very close.
"I believed, Rover, I believed in everything and trusted everyone," His awkward sincerity wins her over.
Rover hugs her knees, closes her eyes, smiling wearily, unsure if this is possible: talking about death, about skillful illusions, talking to someone who doesn't exist, after Leviathan only gives way to myths, feels like a legend.
"You are you, with your choice and personality, whoever it was who wrote you into this world." A shadow of darkness, grief, and anger appears on her face. A deep-seated horror is born from the mere mention of books, strategy, outrageousness, leaders and followers, shattering faith irreparably, like it all broke him. One part of her wants to do something to pay the debt.
“We are people, living people, Avidius, you are alive, you are the same, made of flesh and blood,” Rover intertwines their fingers over the living tissue, looking at his hands—strong and calloused, without a single drop of blood, they can and are capable of protecting their master, but are they capable of falling?
"I never existed, honestly, it doesn't matter."
Avidius shrugs, squeezes her hand, not even half as tightly as he could, holds it for a few moments, and then abruptly releases it, stands with a smooth, fluid movement, and turns his head absently toward his own tombstone.
"Me... is it me?" Deep surprise flickers in him, and something resembling respect. "They buried me?."
"As someone whose name is remembered."
Avidius nods understandingly, smiling, boldly staring into the unfolding abyss, and Rover sees bitterness in that smile. His presence makes her dream. His presence makes her think everything is alright. His presence makes her believe the powerlessness is healing. She falls silent too, but it's enough to see more without reading into the silence of the dead: none of this is written into his role.
"Thank you for everything."
"Don't blame yourself, Rover,. he says, still completely awkwardly, and she forces a laugh - not on purpose, only because she hears her name so often.
A great honor, a great responsibility—and equally great pain. Someone else's will.
She forces herself to exhale so that her hands stop shaking. The rose petals have a rusty, sweet scent, and she almost chokes on it. She gets up, creeps closer, an arm's length between them. The sweetness burns metallically, and then the tacet on her palm suddenly (doesn't)respond.
All in vain, unimportant – his hoarse, soft voice bursts from the chest. “Thank you, Rover.”
The white flowers on the ground are dead; withered – impossibly quickly frozen in an ugly way. They disintegrate, carried away by the wind.
The earrings in his ears swayed, brushed by the wind, and his clothes darkened, heavy with water, stained blue and dark. Avidius looks at the letters on the stone, standing on the opposite side of the grave, serious and thoughtful, then turns back. His hand, clenched into a fist, fell to his chest near his heart, and then something unclean envelopes his body.
She swears there is the Tide splashes across his face, drawing alarming patterns and cracks across his cheeks.
Everything inside her is shaking, trembling, twisting, she sees him towards her, beside her without taking a single step, when Avidius pulls her to his chest when he wraps his arms around her, leaving his palm on the meek, motionless nape of her neck. Avidius sobs into her ear, presses his lips to her temple, hugs her just as hopelessly, as if pleading, as if disappearing or she is not capable to hold on to herself.
The night crumbles sharply, erasing the frozen darkness with gold, painting it a heart-red.
Rover closes her eyes, inhales sharply, clings to his shoulders, unafraid of getting dirty, holds on tightly, clasps her hands on his back, squeezing tighter—not the cold, formless emptiness, not the fake breath. The deceptive, feigned embrace melts away, touched by the dark blue flashes of the mire sliding down layer after layer. Wheat-colored strands of hair slip between the phalanges, weightless as real ones.
Rover's eyes widen, Rover pushes him away.
Rover hears Abby's scream.
Rover sees—or perhaps doesn't for a moment—green obscuring the pure blue of the pupils. A piercing green that is numbingly green.
Another movement, another face.
Please, stop it, please...
A strange appearance.
No, no, wake up, it's not him!
An arrogant smile. Sweet talk.