Chapter Text
He needs to ask her. Needs to hear her say it to him one more time so he can finally give up hope. Finally give up on her. His people need him to marry a Carja noblewoman, and one who holds draw and power in the area. One of hope and goodness who can spread the joy and light of the Sun down upon the Carja who remain.
But that woman would never be the one he wants.
And he might never see her again. He never knows if she’ll return back to his lands, and if she does would she even stop by to say hello? It seemed less likely for her to do so. He knows that she politely rejected him the first time, graciously accepted his apology, but he really did mean it when he said he had thought of little else since her departure. The way that she blushed when she asked if the Tenakth liked tiaras. Maybe he had imagined it but she was putting up with his slightly less than subtle flirtation. At that moment he knew he had to ask her before she left, if not just to hear her crush his hope fully one last time.
He finds himself drawn to those with power. It started with Ersa. She felt like his support in all senses of the word. Aloy however has a warmth to her, coupled with a weight he can see pushing down on her as if she was meant to hold up the sky itself. She is like him. Faced with a burden and too young to ever come back from it. She drags shackles behind her as he does, prisoners to their own desire to make the world better.
But when she walks she truly seems like the saviour of Meridian. It’s in the way she carries herself, like she isn’t of her immediate world. A goddess in her own right, but a woman just the same. She steels herself against the praise like one would against arrows.
She would never choose to stay here permanently, in a place that worships the ground she walks on. Gives her a title to isolate her further from society, making her an outcast once more. And yet he asks her anyways, asks her if she comes back to spend time and get to know him. Hopes the tiara and spear can be tokens to remember him by, to remember that there is someone waiting for her company, her voice, her quiet fury. When she says yes, that she would like to come back, but can’t think about the future right now he feels like he has crested a 10 foot wave.
If Ersa is hidden strength then Aloy is freefalling headfirst into the unknown. And he thinks he might want to drown in it.
How he wishes he could join her in the Forbidden West and fight alongside her. Clear up disputes over his people himself, without having to send thousands of messengers to do it for him. But he is akin to a God himself, the Sun-King come to save the people of the Sundom from themselves. He cannot leave until he is free for as much as he believes he loves her, his love for his people burns a thousand times brighter.
While she walks away he wonders if she’ll become too big for him. Meridian must have once seemed like a land stretched beyond the concealed cage of the Embrace. Now, with the Forbidden West in her sights his kingdom will seem weak and cheap. It’s too close to where she once was. Who she once was. The battles she’ll struggle out there will be grander than anything she’ll see in here, the cultures less ordered and bleeding into the heart of the land. People with free spirits like her. Meridian will become another sort of cage; of the gilded kind.
He knows that once she’s out there he’ll have lost her forever. But to hear her give him empty promises now? Well it soothes him beyond anything.
He finds Itamen playing with his sword in the dust soon after. The little boy holds so much youth and promise for someone who had not long ago been fed the honeyed trickeries of spymasters and murderers. Yet, here in Meridian he seems to resume his role again; as a child, who will learn of only kindness and diplomacy. Nasadi takes his hand, shrouded in her deep purple veils and he will admit he always feels wary of her. She dons Eclipse colours so regally in a place scarred by them, and acts like they are a stain upon her person at the same time.
However, the white robes he dons feel so ironic when he thinks of his citizens who dress in the bloodstained red of dusk. He is the only one of them who truly has blood on his hands, soaked to the bone with that of the tortured souls of the Sun Ring and his brother, his father, the mother he never knew. He gave everything for the Carja and look where it’s left him. The screams that ring out sometimes from the deep recesses of his mind don’t quieten enough for him to focus on his daily reports. He finds himself stuck in between the past and the present often, relishing in the smiles of those around him and feeling light, his mind empty save for the background noise of worry that comes with being a king. Other times he feels bogged down by the fact that no amount of atonement will ever make up for the sins of the past. He cannot climb the mountain of bodies alone. But he would do it a hundred times over to save those who were left.
His father laid out a grave path for him. He will rectify it at all costs. Peace will be held in the kingdom for as long as he lives. They will bleed his body and soul for as long as they can to make up for the Red Raids and he will let them. They will never know a devotion like his again. Hopefully Aloy will come back before they are done. One last glimpse of his future that never was. Or so he thinks.
He collapses in his throne, gold and stone glinting as if bathed in sparkles as the heavy set of the Sun begins. He eyes the stack of reports sitting on the small table next to it, midnight black ink sitting in a pot with a quill. Scroll upon scroll stacked and waiting for his attention. He attacks them with determination and tact, a king unlike any the Carja had seen before. When his hand begins to cramp and the guards disappear until he is left with his nighttime watch he finally sets down the quill and lets his head sink back, closing his eyes briefly.
As his true God pulls down the last tendrils of its glow over the land the Sundom falls to shadow, and so too does his mind to the figures who once lurked there.