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Throughout the years there had always been something there. As thin as a spider’s thread, and just as sticky, and just like a spider’s thread, only visible in a certain light or when hung with dewdrops. Esen would see it in the corner of his eye on those short winter days when the yellow sun hit the plains from the side and made himself and Ouyang and their mounts seem insignificant compared to the giant shadows beside them.
If Esen could collect all the glimpses of that elusive but ever-pulling wire, finer than a hair, maybe they could be twisted into a rope.
There were enough.
Esen did not twist that rope. Whenever he saw the spark, he swallowed hard and let it go.
He had watched it rise up through falling snow and get caught in the flame of a torch once. It always came back. And Esen never dared reach for it.
Those long shadows did not do great deeds and bring great pride on their own. No, that was the business of their casters.
Yet sometimes when they overlapped, while Esen and Ouyang stood apart, it felt as if the sun itself was taunting him. A trick of light connecting them in ways they couldn’t be.
One dark shape on the snow-mottled grass, whole in a way they couldn’t be.
Esen’s longing – he recognized it as such at least – had no aim. When he desired, he desired the unreal unity of their overlapping shadows. He knew whom but not how or to what end.
Wives were given to Esen like things. They talked and moved, always ready should he wish to put them to use. The best thing about each visit was when he’d put it behind him, and still he never left in a good mood.
He would touch them and they responded for him. Like things made for just that.
Esen often wished a man could fall off a wife like a bad rider off a horse.
But wives would never let that happen and it made Esen feel like less of a man than if they had kicked and buckled over his clumsiness, his halfhearted, uninspired performance.
Esen liked it when he and his general would ride fast, not things to be held down but impossible to grasp, like shadows.
Once, afterwards they stood so close on the ice-crusted steppe that the hot clouds of their breath drifted into another and Esen never forgot that moment.
When he was younger, before that specific day even, Esen had dreams. Of writhing bodies – their bodies – euphoric with the feeling of each other in a nameless act.
They might as well have been dragons in those dreams, he knew.
Or shadows.
Men did things with eunuchs, and shamefully Esen knew about them. His ears pricked up when crude jokes were made nearby only so later he could wish to erase everything he’d heard.
All of it was insulting and could therefore never be what he longed for.
Esen’s longing was not – although it would have made sense – the desire of a conqueror. Violence and force were absent from it.
Esen wished for an act for their bodies to engage in that could uplift and honor. The mysterious dragon touches from his dreams.
But there were no answers to his longing. He feared that even vague and unuttered it was an insult in itself.
Spider’s silk gleaming golden in the sun, dewdrops. Esen had never paid them any mind before he needed them as ciphers for what he felt.
A rider approaches across the endless snow. Beautiful, strong and like nobody else. Again the thread is spun and for all its frailty, it isn’t a plaything of the wind but suspended between two riders, wound around a beating heart on each end. As it always has been.
Esen strokes the wing of the eagle perched on his arm with all the leaden tenderness he carries inside.
Ouyang’s look is stern as if he could see it and sought to remind Esen that he, too, must sacrifice a part of himself in this life.