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Lahabrea leaned back in his chair tucked beneath the desk of his office and sighed. His mind so prone to wander like beasts out to gaze so often resulted in boons to his creative prowess. In those tall grasses of his mind, he invented beauties innumerable. Large birds that smelled of clover who could carry entire villages on their back and small rodents who could serve to dig out irrigation systems in the low countries, leaving vibrant trails of luminescent aether as they went. Yet as taut shoulders slumped and his writing hand uncurled from its posture around his pen, the draybeast of his mind returned to the same thistle patch that it had time and time again through so many years.
Long, dark fingers against his wrist. Softness in his ear, proposing a riddle to a friend. The Speaker averted his gaze from no one but himself, forcing himself to remember the reality of which never worked in stopping him before. Athena was dead, and that was the truth he would chew on until the reality melted on his tongue. Athena was dead and had been for some years, yet as he traced across the memory all he could see were those hands. Pianist’s fingers, delicate and steadfast, with palms that were meant to deliver the impossible finality of death. The mother of his child had died ( dispelled, subdued, and murdered more accurate ) yet as he had been victim to so many times before, all he could think of were the hands that would have carried her soul into the sea. The same hands that instructed him on the matter of breaking his own soul like oil-dipped bread, with concern and utmost care.
Hands he had known to be light as a feather in their touch, as light as the voice that would trickle into his office like music itself, asking for eons what the Speaker had been busying himself with. Like those honest hands, often times the man who once called himself Hephaistos thought the intruder to be the only one who earnestly cared what it was he worked on. A self serving delusion, more than likely, built up like a glorious fiction to enable exactly what he wished he would stop doing yet lacked the conviction to. An oversight, really.
Lahabrea’s own hands were not so indelicate that he could not mime the blind man’s touch. Soft fingers marred with burns loosened their steady grip to practice the art of being a bird’s wing. Beating gently against the linen of his own black robes, he drew a slow breath out from beneath the scowl of his red mask. When his own touch had reached his knee, starting to bunch the fabric up with all the slowness of raising a bucket from a well, he shook his head.
“Incomparable,” he chided himself, letting the robe drop. His veins were on fire, aether burning like a match struck in the dark. The dark he needed, for the endlessness of Death who played his piano was always the perfect backdrop to make even the smallest of his sparks seem like forest fires. In the bright light of his office, he was but a candle’s dying flame. It would not do, and yet it had to.
But not here in this place that still smelled of that day’s work, charred aether hanging thick in the air with all the reminders of how far he had to go before his creations breathed the perfection he wished them to. Instead, the older gentleman gathered himself and his belongings up and set for home, leaving his office cloaked in the same darkness he needed with the wag of a departing finger. Along the footpath to the grand complex that hosted most of the Word’s employees, he did his best not to be ensnared in idle conversation with those who always seemed to want to talk about something. Usually, he was kind enough to stand and hear the words as they were spoken, and to entertain the theories they portended.
However, as the sun set against the glistening horizon of skyscrapers and the inescapable hum of the citadel’s transportation system in the western quadrant of Amaurot tickled his brain, Lahabrea could not deign to be distracted. It was verging on fear the way he walked with his rigid posture towards the building, its looming body staring down at him like a demeaning giant. It was as if every window was an eye, blinking at him, waiting for him as he approached the large glass doors of the lobby and pressed his crystalline fob against the panel.
“Welcome home, Speaker Lahabrea,” it mused at him, glass doors that were never properly locked sliding open. The sunset against their stained glass ornamentation sending slivers of blue and purple across the lobby floor. He wondered how he might describe something as beautiful in its mundanity to the blind man if he were there, how he would translate such a small detail into fact someone who could only perceive through soulsight. Lahabrea pinched the nose bridge of his mask at the thought, nearly in utter disbelief that even something as sterile and sexless as sliding doors could not keep his mind at bay. One tracked, it so seemed, and the greyhound legs of his thoughts had run the course muddy then barren.
The door called after him. “A package awaits at your residence, room 5612. Sender, anonymous.”
The soft sound of his shoes echoed in the empty lobby as he approached the elevators, passing by plants and empty leather couches. He had, gratefully, beaten the tumultuous rush hour home from the communal dining hall, it seemed. Where his had once pinched, his fingers loosened their hold against the red enamel to instead stroke over the curve of a carved grimace. It was a nervous habit, one that he had had since he was but a babe in the white mask, his fingers instinctually reaching for permanent features as if to ground the unpredictable nature of his own.
A package, he thought to himself as the elevator opened, then closed, then shot quickly up to the fifty-sixth floor. He had no need for a package at this time, the idea of unwrapping anything but himself from his robes near blasphemy as he watched the city he had come to love rush into perfect, horizontal view. He wished he knew how to savor it then, how to appreciate every architectural marvel instead of looking towards the spires and feeling nothing but the ghostly touch of his friend the Keeper when he set to using aether to prod at his ankles in jest. How he had come to adore that aether, like the hands, and how he forced himself to believe it was tugging him out from the elevator when at last its large, gilded doors opened.
The hallway was inconsequential leading to the impressively large door at the end of it. He still lived in the suite that had been procured with the purpose of raising up a family, the city-state granting such cases larger spaces to accommodate a family with all of their myriad interests. Lahabrea had once dreamed of Athena agreeing to live with him, ensuring she would have ample room for a library and double the room for their son to explore whatever it might have been that struck his fancy. Instead, she kept herself and the gifted cradle to her own apartment, urging that he understand that her love would be ferocious and better suited for small spaces. Children need confinement, she had whispered into his ear one evening, bare and beautiful in the moonlight as she mounted him, like the womb. He had thought it poetic at the time. Erichthonios was meant to grow up in a large, domed room with windows as tall as his father and a piano unlike any the star had seen before.
A gift from the blind man with the soft fingers. He looked down at the package sat before his door. He did not need the gift of soulsight to feel the energy of his aforementioned friend, his torture, on the neatly wrapped black box. Bending down, Lahabrea smiled at the feeling of aether snapping out like an excited dog, visible tendrils of black wisping over the bareness of his hands and into his sleeves.
Always the playful one. Once the darkness had dissipated, an inscription appeared in runic scrawl across the black of the box. Like an embossment, it was raised from the onyx like a volcano coming from the sea, meant to be read with fingers rather than eyes. Obliging his friend who he could not see, but whose aether still tickled beneath his robes and deep in the pit of his stomach, he ran his long index across the words. Gilded box impressed unto thee, wrapped in ribbon and curiosity, should you turn the small crank three, your gentle hand will set mine overture free.
Lahabrea stood up from his position, bringing the box to the helm of his chest as his back ached in gentle reprimand. It was if for a moment the intention of his hasty arrival to his home was all but forgotten, his fingers near childish in the way they began to open the gift at the delicate hinge of the box. The ribbon drifted to the floor of his foyer as he pushed into his suite, eyeing the room that had once been a nursery converted into an overly burdened library meticulously sorted. A book on fairytales, bright turquoise in its binding, stared back at him from its place on a chair as he finally cracked open the box. Looking down into it, Lahabrea sighed with a knowing a smile. Another music box, another composition.
How he had grown addicted to the Keeper’s music, how the alchemic weaving of his song could stir aether unlike any tincture created before. How the man could harness the boundless energy of the dead to invoke such creativity, ardor, and thoughtfulness in the living had always been beyond him, and each time he sat for a live performance before the instrumentalist, or at his side, he grew ever more bewildered. Their star had been gifted a strange godbeing, blind and sharp of tongue, and he had chosen to spend his day making a music box for the Speaker and the Speaker alone.
Lahabrea sighed, taking hold of the contraption as if it were made of glass rather than its durable steel and delicate gold. He sat the gifting box aside on a console table, suddenly keenly aware once more of what he longed for and how he longed for it, the heat in the pads of his fingers enough to create a static spark when he touched the crank per the rune’s instruction. Swallowing thickly, the widower drifted towards the bedroom as his wrist did as it was asked. One, two, three.
The room was filled with a tinkling melody, quiet and warm as it drifted up the walls and coated the ceiling. It danced with the elegance he was accustomed to, drifting through the air of the darkened bedchamber illuminated only by sunset. As any proper appreciator of the arts would, Lahabrea found himself sinking to the edge of his bed to better appreciate the sound the emanated from the box he left on the bedside table. At last, when it had finished painting his room with the vibrancy of its composer’s craft, and had begun to tickle his ears in earnest, he felt his aether stir in accordance to the rhythm.
“Oh,” He breathed with a smile, tired eyes drifting shut. “Kereboros you have outdone yourself.”
The emotion the song stirred was indescribable. A boon to his creativity boundless, he saw a symphony of images behind his lids. It was like wading into endless waters of thought and imagination, his soul touched at every angle by the possibilities of what was once deemed impossible. In the music-induced state, he imagined herds of horses running with enough fervor to turn hoove prints into flower patches and aether wound so tight a concept of pure light could be created to rival the sun. And then, in the pit of his stomach, the stirring inspiration met his desire.
The song crescendoed as Lahabrea reclined, staring up at the lines in his tin ceiling. Lines like the purple strings that ran down Kereboros’s throat that thrummed with primordial aether. Reaching upwards, he traced along a gilded line and imagined instead it was one on flesh the color of the most beautiful night. He imagined how the song from the man’s body might mingle with the song that had been written for him and him alone. A sudden gash of longing struck through him like a bolt of levin, his skilled hand curling in on itself where he held it above his head just moments before. It dropped like lead at his side, and he gave himself the ultimatum.
Either he would be kind to himself and will the desire away through work, as he had done many times before. Or he would be kind to himself and find release on the back of the music box and his imagination, sculpting pleasure from his thoughts alone. As he laid there and became keenly aware of how exhausted he was from the day’s work, his mind drifted to what it was Kereboros would have wanted.
The tall man crowned by the ocean of woolen hair with a voice that moved no different than his music would have wanted him to find kindness in rest. To allow himself the feeling of being so tired his bones almost ached just to feel the relief of sleep when it came. Closing his eyes, he replayed a time so many years before when the other man had leaned close to him, whispering to him that they should spend the evening at the Hall of Rhetoric just to bore themselves to sleep on the underlings unimpressive debate. They had gone together, and it was only when he had started to doze in the center pew that he had realized Kereboros had casted a ward of invisibility around them for the entire evening. The two men slept head to head, masks loose but still fixed, until dawnbreak. It was the first time Lahabrea had felt truly seen since abandoning his birth name, ironic though it was to be while in the company of a blind man and unseen by the tens of people around them.
The memory warmed his groin as much as it did his chest, his lips parting in what felt like a smile his mind tried to fight.
Opening his eyes again with a deliberate slowness, he imagined what face he wished to see most staring back at him. At first came the pupiless bright eyes, hazed over and blind as they looked at him with their indirectness. Next came the long slope of nose that curved down before flesh could curve back out again in the shape of wide, full lips. White lashes blinked at him, soon framed by the endless amount of hair made of soft wool and colored the gentlest off-white. When the face had at last resolved and the rest of the body came into perfect view, the creator sighed.
“You call on me again in an hour much too early, Lahabrea,” The shade spoke to him, his appendages still manifesting in solid form. Aether swirled over the length of formidably long limbs until they became something that he could touch. Or rather, much to his inward approval, be touched by. Kereboros raised a large hand as he had so often done in the flesh, fingers delicately finding the side of Lahabrea’s face to read his emotions. A thumb found issue with the subtle downturn of his lips. “I only jest, dear friend, do not look at me so. Lest your face gets caught in a grimace, unsightly as it is.”
“You cannot see.” Lahabrea murmured, brow furrowing.
“Then it must be truly ghastly to those who can.” Kereboros chuckled and sloped his fingers back into Lahabrea’s hair, as if he were a dog being pet. He wanted to snarl ; how badly he liked it.
He tried to remember the first time he had wanted the other man so badly he had hewn him from aether. Like an artist taking to the marble driven by the madness of desire, it had been so many years ago then. When his hair was still the color of a freshly stoked kiln, and when Kereboros’s own had hardly made it past the length of his shoulders. Youthfulness had begun to fade on both of their faces, yet their eyes had yet to acquire that glimmer of age that spoke of wisdom unbound. They were foolish, and friendly, and their conversations infinite. Closing his eyes as the apparition appraised him, Lahabrea hummed upon the recollection. It had been the evening of Halmarut’s banquet, when all the convocation members gathered to celebrate the induction of a new body to fill an old seat. Kereboros, wont as he was to cling to the shadows when not abiding by the piano’s keys, had absconded with a plate full of food and a wanting smile for company. Lahabrea had followed to reprimand him, to tell the younger yet infinitely older man that if he were to hunt for table scraps the least he could do was give a toast to the new member of their board. Yet when he had opened his mouth to speak, all he found was sweet, fried dough against his lips instead.
“It is delightfully mediocre,” Kereboros mused, blindly bumping the bread against the red mask, “would you care for a bite? ”
“Would you care for a bite?” Lahabrea opened his eyes to the shade above him, who had moved his long, clawed fingers from stroking at delicate and thinning gray hair down the sides of his face. He restrained a shiver into the touch, his recounting of days long gone broken by the feeling of a thumb slipping into his mouth.
“You degrade me,” The Speaker grumbled around the thumb before his tongue loosened, becoming pliant against it. It tasted not of flesh, but aether.
“I would never do such a thing,” Kereboros whispered, head falling forward until he was drinking in the same breath Lahabrea let out. “I give you what it is you want but are too cowardly to ask for. It is a kindness,” The thumb moved out, streaking a wet path down the line that creased near Lahabrea’s lips and into his facial hair.
“One that so few afford you, might I add. When was the last time someone did what you wanted without being asked?” The musician contented himself at the smaller man’s neck as punctuation to his sentence, soft lips like tingling needles at the front of his throat. Lahabrea drew a long noise of thought from his chest, looking to the clock on the wall as if it would give him an answer. He had not the heart to tell even the ghost that the only one who had done so was the piece of fiction he conjured every so often to let fuck him. That Kereboros was the only one who knew where to go, what to do, and how to speak without being directed. So tired Lahabrea grew of giving directives, how worn he had become with “put your mouth on me” and “turn over” in the dark of his room or anyone else’s. He liked the feeling of being in the presence of something grander than him, something far more unknowable than a fellow keywarden or the woman who had served him coffee at the cafeteria complex before she became the overseer of culinary arts in the southron country-state, Photeionos. He had loved the color of her hair.
“Have you found yourself distracted, has my company bored you? Are you again thinking about the woman with the soft hair and how she brought you apples and sugared your coffee?” Kereboros tutted, pulling his face away from the neck that had become softly bruised in the course of Lahabrea’s thinking. “She never managed to brew my tea right, you should know.”
His eyes darted northwards. “Mind your tongue.”
“You must mind it for me,” Kereboros smiled, canting his head to the side in playful accusation, “you made me, after all. It wags because you want it to.”
“I should have unmade you long ago,” Lahabrea steeled but his eyes betrayed the truth. They softened at the edges as hands reached up to take hold of the soft curls of hair that fell around the other man’s face. He wondered in passing if one day he would find the voice to tell the real man how much he had come to adore that hair though the years. How much he liked the smell of the oil used at the roots, like rose water and butter churned out from the volcanic fruits to the south. His fingers moved against the dense softness until they found long ears hiding beneath, curving around their form. Kereboros purred with contentment.
“You could still unmake me now, Lahabrea,” the melodic voice made his legs tremble, “through your touch alone, if you are brave enough. Here,” He breathed, shifting above the older man until the rest of the impressively long body came into view. “Allow me to lead by example, unfair as it is to ask so much of you.”
Kereboros, but not Kereboros, gripped his hips and pulled him down the sheets to the inguinal warmth of his legs.
Lahabrea spread his own legs and allowed the manifested aether to move up his thigh. He knew that the visage before his eyes would have prolonged the ordeal, that he would have taken him to the edge of pleasure and held him there until it hurt before he even spared him an inch. But the phantom above him was not the man he wanted, he reminded himself, and reasoned that to err too close to the real thing would make his inaccuracies more intolerable. If the Kereboros made of thought were too gentle, the Speaker might be liable to realize he had forgotten a freckle or placed a birthmark where it should not have been. His head lulled back as the tendril of darkness tore down the skirting of his leggings, peeling away the fabric with earnestness that was only his own.
“Tell me you want this,” Lahabrea said to the man who was not there and there. The shade responded with a low hum, the lines of his throat pitching brighter as a ghostly hand touched the firebrand’s chest.
“I will not deign to want this,” Kereboros spoke, voice low and lilting as a long finger moved the folds of his robes aside to touch gently at a collarbone and then up to the swell of his adam’s apple. “As that lacks specificity.”
Lahabrea screwed his eyes shut. It was too accurate, it was precisely what the real musician would have said if asked. The aether between his legs was made to breach him, its length unyielding as it slipped inside with a jolt of ease.
The shade rescinded his words and tried again according to Lahabrea’s new specifications.
“I want this.” Kereboros said. Lahabrea gasped before tightening his jaw again, as if biting around a metal bit, his pleasure threatening to rip at the reins. The soft tinkling of the music box, of metal on metal, set his jaw to relaxing once more. If this were like he wished the real thing to be, he would not be so tense. No, he would melt into every touch and would lull his head to the side to welcome peppered affections from lips that could not possibly know exactly where they were landing. Sometimes he thought himself depraved for wanting nothing more than an off-kilter kiss against his lips, finding privilege in the man’s blindness. To be wanted by a man who could see everything about one but nothing at all, the apex of their society’s egalitarianism, was indescribable.
He let himself feel wanted in that music. How the chords plucked along while his hips fell open, allowing the aether deeper passage as the shade above him began to strip from his layers. Beautiful skin unfurled in front of his half-lidded gaze, kissed by freckles like black stars on the midnight sky. Lahabrea had never seen Kereboros naked, of course, but he liked to imagine that the same star path that gashed his face in freckles would continue down over his shoulder, perhaps even towards his wrist. Lahabrea canted his head to the opposite side then, gray hair falling in his face as he found the crook of the shade’s elbow to kiss at. The music made him feel infinite as he fixated on the freckles there, his energy boundless as the shade above him laughed in accordance to the tempo of the composition.
At some point the man forgot it was none other but him that pulled the strings of it, allowing himself to believe that if the musician’s aether could move the box and fill the room, then it too could blend with the shade that fucked into him. A delusion kissed by the Keeper himself, the unofficial seat of the Convocation so misunderstood by his peers rocking into him slow and deep. An honor unparalleled, to be doted upon by a man of such infinite skill and grace, entirely his for an evening.
Lahabrea moaned as fabricated hands pushed his robes up softly, mirth in the width of the taller man’s chest. “You hide from me like winter, the most beautiful things waiting under snow. Be kind to me,” Kereboros mused, pulling the robes open until the older man was forced to confront his straining need between his own legs and the aether that thrusted in and out of his wanting body. “Melt for me, Hephaistos, and show me your flowers.”
Only Kereboros called him by his true name, despite the indignation it received. Would hearing it now, forced by only his mind alone, confirm that Lahabrea had liked it every time?
The shade took hold of him softly, folding him inward around the tendril that had, through sheer force of imagination, transformed into the solid thing he had gone so long without. Dark shadow gave way to dark flesh, kissed with veins and framed by a soft thatching of pubic hair. Groaning, the Speaker nodded into his given command ; the command he had given himself.
“Give me something to melt for.”
The shade laughed like bells and bent his neck forward, forcing him to watch with a firm grip at the back of his skull as he was fucked open, burn-kissed thighs quaking as he did so. “Ah,” Lahabrea began to protest, the usual spot in his spine that had been troubling him since his early years coming alive with a burning jolt, “You are a good listener.”
“It is how I see you, after all.” Kereboros retorted. Lahabrea closed his his eyes harder that time, knowing full well those very words had been spoken to him by the real man once. It was if he were assembling a ransom letter from newspaper clippings, rearranging all the words he had heard before by Death’s mouth. If it were not for the context of their usage, he thought for a moment that Kereboros would be proud of the illusion. That the master of souls, riddles, and puzzles would be delighted by the trickery he inflicted only on himself. As the mirage of pleasure rocked into his tightening walls, he let the imagined yet painfully tangible man have his flowers.
It had been so long since he had melted for anyone else, even his clandestine meetings with senior staff at the Words of Lahabrea, or late night trawls through the wing of the great library that was known for such arrangements, lacked enough heat to melt the man. He remained firm in position, forcing himself to give what was required to get the job done and little more. Depending on the person, it took little at all, while others required some modicum of romance. He did not mind either approach, and found joy in the release of tension against another’s body all the same. But to melt required a temperature only his dearest dead and Death himself seemed to possess. Finding humor in the irony that he melted for a man whose skin was naturally cold to the touch, he grunted with each thrust into him. Like a metronome, he sighed each time the backs of his thighs hit the front of Kereboros’s, throat tight with the heat of want. The music box left on the ornate table to his left tinkled on, as if it were a third person set of eyes in the room growing increasingly warm from accumulated aether.
“You are thinking it again,” The shade whispered into his ear, the tip of a black tongue tracing the contour of a lobe. Lahabrea stiffened and felt the tip of his cock wet with a silvery pearl.
Pushing his head upwards into the other man’s shoulder, he grunted. “I am doing no such thing.”
“You want me to break you,” Kereboros continued, hand finding the face at his shoulder. The man pulled him gently back by the hair, forcing him to look up at unfixed eyes, “to hurt until your hurt feels as if it is reward,” Kereboros moaned for the first time since he had begun, the sound enough to snap Lahabrea’s hips forward, as if spine on a leash. “I did not like it last time, choking you seemed little more than gimmick. A game angry children play. I might steal your breath another way, a way meant for men like us.”
Lahabrea slammed his forehead back against the shoulder he had been wrought from, brows stern as he did so. “Enough of this, you are meant to serve me.”
He would have never said something so cruel to Kereboros. The real one. The shade knew this and laughed, a warm note of dominance rising up in his throat in a near condescending hum. It was if his friend pitied him. Lahabrea felt his insides clench before aethermade hands found his shoulders. A quick shove of them and darkness was upon him.
Pushed back in the sheets, Kereboros enveloped around him like a curtain thrown over the world. Nails dragged and tickled across flesh until Lahabrea was stark naked on the bed, panting as pleasure unrelenting moved into him. It was if the night had spilled into every vein, each nerve ending turning into a funeral pyre of smoke and intoxicating ash. His body laid beneath each smoking plume, his cock hard past the point of delight and flesh feeling consumed by heat he had only felt in the depths of Pandaemonium. And yet it was loving, the realistically hard sound of their bodies colliding seemingly no more than soft percussion to the that still flittered out from the music box. Even in Kereboros’s supposed violence, he was the gentleness of death.
Lahabrea could not breathe, let alone speak enough to protest when it had begun to feel too much. His body would know its limit, and as a the long length beat into him and aether like thousands of hands pored across his body like reading infinite braille, he allowed himself to break in the way Kereboros spoke of. In the way men like them had earned through hard work and thousands of years of loneliness.
The feeling of one mouth, then two, then three kissed at his neck, the rare and intoxicating tritonal voice of the hound Cerberus pulsing against his throat. It sung his praises as his lower back began to seize in protest, long fingers having hitched themselves at hips and forced the older man to be folded nearly in half. He brushed the scruff of his beard against his kneecap, as if to proclaim to himself how amazing it was what the shade could do to him. How brilliant his creation was, and how his body moved for it.
He choked on whatever words had started to form on his lips as Kereboros pulled back to look at him, sweat beading on both of their brows. “I,” Lahabrea started, gasping as aether found the slit of his cock, swirling around it before dipping inwards. He kicked his leg out on instinct, only for lips to catch his ankle with a soft kiss.
“I,” He tried to speak again, tongue feeling heavy as he watched how the man above him slowed the tempo of his near abusive thrusts to kiss gently at the flesh offered to him. Kereboros opened his eyes slowly, their unseeing irises shifting in his direction.
“I know it,” Kereboros smiled, his mouth moving from the ankle. “I know what you mean to say.”
The shade mouthed the three words back to him in utter silence and he came across his stomach.
Across the man who was not there, but who was there enough to give him what he wanted. Kereboros seemed pleased with himself, suddenly clean and without a drop of sweat to his imagined forehead. Lahabrea felt a pang of humility then, panting against the sheets as he wondered why it was he so rarely let the other finish. He attributed his selfishness to age and to the suddenly very apparent feeling of shame that washed over him after he, himself, came down from the tempest.
The shade had procured a dampened cloth from the thinness of air and had started to clean his flesh. “Until we meet again then, Lahabrea.” It spoke to him softly after skin had been rendered void of all evidence of the mess he had made of himself. Leaning forward, Kereboros kissed him gently on the lips. He missed the mark just slightly. “Be well.”
Lahabrea nodded and the man disappeared. He closed his eyes in the emptiness of his room and allowed the sound of the days end outside in the city to drag him back to reality. The thrum of the monorail, the echoing din of his brethren head out to bars and parks for the evening, the sounds in the complex hallway of coworkers returning home for the evening. The music box. Opening his red eyes again, he looked down at his naked self and forced tired limbs to work, pulling fabric back onto the plains of sunkissed flesh spotted sweetly with age. Planting his feet on the side of the bed, Lahabrea felt the ache of his body hum in accordance to the final notes of the song played out from the gift he had been so graciously given. A boon to his creativity, a gift of aether that had made the impossible possible, if only for a moment. A moment that had seemed to draw on forever until it was over, resetting the clock until it would happen again.
In the morning, when sheets had been washed and papers scoured over with a passionate eye for other’s mistakes, Lahabrea set out across the vast sea of his favorite city. He let the birdsong grace his ears and the sound of children playing fly like darts in front of his footpath, watching as little white masks risked falling from gleeful faces as they ran. Turning the corner that would lead to the heart of the Bureau's plaza, he took a slow breath at the sight of a familiar misfit stood against one of the towering plinths. Barefoot as he always was, only sporting thick tights beneath his robes, Kereboros seemed preoccupied with speaking to what appeared to be no more than a shrub not even in its seasonal bloom.
Approaching the much taller man from behind, the Speaker contented himself to listen to the other speak to small twigs before the familiar absurdity forced him to interrupt. “And whatever could you glean from a heap of sticks, Kereboros?”
“More than you might glean from most of the living, most days,” He said simply without turning around, “I am observing a theorem of speech pattern and the aetheric density of plantlife. I have cause to believe that the concerts I hold in the hall might be changing the composition of the landscaping,” He said before trailing off again, conversing with the plant before him.
Lahabrea sighed, crossing his arms while he moved to the side. “And I suppose you will keep this a secret and come two years from now when all the flowers go from blue to red and start bearing fruit, you will laugh as Halmarut loses his head.”
“Pre cise ly, my poi nt.” He articulated the words strangely and watched as Lahabrea himself stiffened, his aether moving from central density outward. The older man huffed.
“You ought to be careful with your gifts, though I fear we have no where else to expel you from.” Lahabrea reminded, though it was not entirely true. Many years past, due to cruel rumor of the man’s origin, a Convocation member proposed Kereboros be banished to Pandaemonium for his unreliability and gravely vast skillset. The Speaker could tell Kereboros remembered the very same moment, though instead of concern he only smiled and straightened up from his crouched position. Lahabrea looked up from behind his mask to meet the one of similar red looking down at him.
“Speaking of gifts,” Kereboros waved his hand, as if to dismiss the earlier comment like a bug, “I trust that the one at your doorstep found you well.”
Lahabrea looked away, giving a curt nod of his head consumed by blush. “It did. A masterwork as always, Kereboros.”
“Ah, and I am glad to hear it. I figured that you had begun to grow bored with usual songs that encouraged sleep and contemplation,” Kereboros reached behind himself, patting the corded rope that usually donned the large, gold staff of seeing he kept strapped to his back. With a thoughtful grunt, he begun to look around.
Lahabrea wordlessly offered his hand in lieu of the rod that allowed the man to traverse more easily. “And so what was the intention this time, if not creativity and quiet contemplation. I did find the results more,” He swallowed thickly, “spirited.”
Kereboros hummed, his aether tinkling as he ceased his searching and took hold of the hand offered out to him, his touch guided to it by the outline of the other’s brightly burning soul. Brighter than the last time he had seen it.
With a nod from the Keeper, the Speaker began to walk towards their predetermined destination that morning. Kereboros was to get pancakes and a new tome of riddles for his prowess at the Hall of Rhetoric four days before, wherein Lahabrea was the uncontested loser. Kereboros walked with his languid gait at his side, robes swaying in the wind as he did.
“It was meant to invoke desire,” Kereboros said simply, with a smile. Lahabrea tightened his grip on the other man’s hand without meaning to. “Not of a particular sort, yet the sort of desire that spurs men to do both great and at times foolish things. I had hoped you might do whatever it is you restrain yourself from,” the deathbringer continued, melodic voice enough to soothe the growing nerves in Lahabrea’s chest, “You abstain from frivolity overmuch and I sought to encourage an eve of indulgence. The soul, and therefore your work, is better for it.”
“You make a fair point.” Lahabrea suddenly felt like offering his hand as a gentle guide was a horrendous idea. The at times foolish thing Kereboros had suggested, even.
“Fair is grand but it is not the same as a correct point, though I always seek to be both. So tell me, did you indulge yourself, Hephaistos,” Kereboros did as he always had, and ignored the sudden noise of complaint at the usage of his birth name. Of the man he left in Pandaemonium. The Keeper had argued he would use the rightful names of all the seats, as when they crossed into his domain of Death, that would be what he called them. Lahabrea furrowed his brow.“You ate that slice of cake you assured me you were saving for Erichthonios,” Kereboros accused after Lahabrea had been too silent. The Speaker blinked as the other man started to laugh. “Hedonism at its finest, primal urges made manifest on the end of a gilded fork in an effort to starve your child.” His amusement was palpable.
“Yes,” Lahabrea confessed quickly, allowing the other to speak for him rather than risk betraying to the other what exactly his hedonism and indulgence had looked like. “I ate the cake and I washed it down with the barrel aged bottle of whiskey. I even had myself a second glass on a work night, and finished reviewing three matrixes while in my cups, if you are so inclined to know my vices.”
Kereboros seemed pleased with himself and his work as he walked ahead, already onto the next subject as he so often was. He spoke of the stars and their conjunctions, how he believed space to make music in accordance to their positioning. He derailed his own thought with a counterpoint, and then moved about a tale from a dead man’s mouth. When they crossed the plaza together, Lahabrea ignored the sideways glances at the odd pair who moved their their milling city. He was glad that his friend could not see the others and their misplaced misunderstanding, and happier still that the man much too old to be excited for pancakes seemed lazily overjoyed for just that thing as they approached the patisserie.
As Kereboros let go of the other man’s hand to grab for the door, gentleman that he was, he was also glad that he could not see his apartment that morning.
Indeed, two glasses of whiskey and a plate of cake crumbs sat on a small dining room table that never welcomed guests and a high necked black robe folded beside his dishes in need of similar cleaning, smeared with that night’s first indulgence.