The Burning Rose

PRELUDE

but love has ways of bringing things back to life

~I Knew It, I Knew You (Taylor Swift)

Act II - Prelude

There was such violence in them. Such bone-deep fervour that sometimes he thought it could combust them from within, leech the life from their very souls.

But then he would look at her some fine morning, glowing as if the sun rose from her very eyes and some violent whirlpool of that same violence would lick up his spine in candour, with a need to drown him in something otherworldly entirely.

How oddly similar violence was in every vein. Be it in the way his brother would look at their wife every time he shed blood in some corner of the world, or be it every time he would look at her with the consuming need to snatch her from the world, make them forget all the years in between till it was just him staring at the stars on a forest floor, the tales of a divine princess draining every drop of promiscuity from him blood.

Tragic, that all these years he had only spent trying to drown himself in something, something that his mind had searched for in other marriages, other lands, other arts, and the admiration of countless smitten minds. All these years, wasted on trying to be all that he was not.

Only to remember himself every time her pulse thundered underneath his palm.

It was worship, he had decided years back, as transcendental as when he would sit for hours at Mahadeva's altar. Hours spent in losing his mind in his body and his body, in turn, to nothingness. And it was vain and impossible of his to be searching for that worship in so many other hands and minds. Mindless, fruitless.

Not fruitless, as she kept saying. The Empire grew. That was the sole anchor of his sanity - the roaring, flourishing success of Indraprastha. Of Aryavarta.

The Empire meant naught, however, when he raced his horse past the borders of Indraprastha's citadel and straight through the dwindling traces of civilization, till they dwindled into forests that could camouflage his skin and his mind alike.

He generally raced without purpose, and just sat staring at the rugged stone temple that sat abandoned where the endless grassy moores blended into the mountains along the horizon.

And then she would just turn up one of those days, sit next to his and stare at the gods the way he did. It would be unbearable, to see a soul as similar yet as perfectly different, and knowing that it was carved solely for the purpose of his and yet knowing that his identity itself transcended the boundaries of his life and his being-

It made him crave normalcy.

Scandalous, really.

He thought that had always been her scandal - unmaking them. Turning them into men, and not just the sons of gods. Making them hunger and love and crave and yearn and grieve and laugh.

"I don't think you should be here.", he decided to tell her as much today.

"No place for a lady, an Empress?", her voice was mockery, but such tiredness laced it that he had to look away and at the imperious glow that the sun shed on her face. He saw a girl. Frightened and dreaming and just... a girl who had garlanded the wrong hero.

"Any place you claim is yours.", the words escaped his past all reason, and in that moment he did not - could not bring himself to - care about what might have went wrong back at home for her to want to race all the way here in search of a fleeting peace that set with the sun.

"How", it was just a whisper, almost as shaky as he had only ever heard her amidst the most intimate of moments, "How do you claim?"

He had no choice but to laugh. "I wish I knew."