What Stirs the Heart
Life was cold.
That was the first lesson the heir apparent of Garlemald remembered grasping. He could not remember his age at the time. Six. Perhaps seven by then. Old enough.
By then routine settled in. Servants who tended to him when he woke. Tutors who occupied his mornings and afternoons. Meals at exact intervals, three daily. They moved like mammets, silent and cold as the snowy landscape outside the windows to his rooms.
Rare were the sightings of his father, who regaled others with his presence but not his only son. The child whose mother’s ashes were whisked away by a brisk breeze before he was old enough to retain even a memory of her. They replaced her with governesses, who came and went as the pressures of palatial life took their toll. Their faces blended together in an amalgamation of generic smiles and equally stunned horror.
The prince, they would say, was an unnerving child. To gaze into his eyes was to see nothing but the brisk, bone chilling winds of Garlemald. But to cross him, one would see the lightning flash. He took a finger once. An earlobe another time. Swift as they fled, they were replaced. And not a word of discipline about it.
This, he learned, was simply how the world worked. He studied, traded thoughts with philosophers. Smiled that unnerving smile of his as they fell hush at the fatalistic school of thought he had adopted. He honed his body with any weapon worth learning. Everything is transactional, he understood. A handshake, an exchange of gil or information. Nothing warm in the cold feeling of coin in your hand, or a clammy handshake with a questionable tradesman.
Adolescence was no storm of hormones. Sex, alcohol, none of it held more than a fleeting interest. Merely sating physical needs, but nothing to stimulate the soul. Nothing to burn bright enough to warm him. Doma. Ala Mhigo. No matter how pleasant the temperature, it might as well have been the depths of a Garlean winter.
Nothing stimulated him except battle. Nothing stirred his blood like combat against a worthy opponent. In his teens, he trained until he beat his teachers bloody. Then dispatched them as one might cast aside a broken blade. The Doman rebellion gave him a taste for combat. Hardly twenty and one and he faced trained samurai, ninjas, warriors of repute. And they had fallen like rows of corn stalks, harvested by his blades. Barely a fleeting moment of true, glorious heat flushed his cheeks.
And then it was gone, just like that. The cold seeped back into his bones and curled around his heart like an old lover. But he understood, in that moment, what that heat felt like, and he craved more.
Then came the light. An elezen man, with skin like charcoal and eyes as blue as processed ceruleum. Their first meeting disappointed, but he sensed the potential. A blow that should have killed easily, merely wounded, and broke his favorite katana. Their eyes locked. He read the man’s gaze, the rage and anger and determination furrowing the man’s brow.
His heart… fluttered.
A curious thing, those first beats. Those first stirrings of his heart, the blood pumping warm in his veins. And oh, too fleeting. It confused him. A dozen, nay a hundred times he had witnessed that expression on the faces of other fighters. Usually just before death claimed them, or one last stroke from his blade. None of them had given him so much as pause. They were no more than broken toys, to be replaced by new ones eventually.
But not this man, who glared at him with gritted teeth. A rivulet of blood darted down his forehead, still lying there prone. He carried two other blades with him. A single stroke with one of them would have ended the man’s life easily.
Yet, all Zenos could do was stare at him.
He retreated. Casting aside his broken sword and leaving the battlefield. This was a new development, and it required time to ponder. To put it in perspective as he had so many other moments in his life. He heard Fordola’s confused squawk as he walked away.
In the intervening days, he examined this new sensation. Turned it over in his mind as if he could puzzle it out and unlock the secrets of it as he had so many other mundane emotions. Those eyes, full of rage and anger, haunted his dreams. Who was this savage? What about him intrigued the prince of Garlemald so?
Most importantly, how could he recapture, experience that moment? What would stir his heart to beat again as erratically as that?
Their second meeting answered that question. The savage came at him again in an ambush. Stronger, this time. His blows packed a punch, his lance stung. Zenos felt that warmth with each blow they traded, felt it filling him as it never had before. Till he felt himself combusting from inside, brimming over with a passion he had never experienced before in all his twenty and six years.
Zenos never claimed to know love. A father who had no time for him. A mother who died shortly after his birth. A host of servants who treated him as a duty. Soldiers and citizens who feared him. No one loved him, and in turn he had no idea how to love anyone else.
But in that moment, he knew. Love was the rush of heat, searing him. Love was the light that glittered in the Doman twilight. Love was the way the other man pressed his attacks, doggedly trading blows even when pushed back time and again.
Love was this man. This savage stranger.
And Zenos would stop at nothing to have him.
