#arlsan senki
During the Great Fire Tahamine stands in the ashes of her home, the sole of her feet bloodied by her husband’s passing. She stands in what was once their sacred bedroom and her tears leave ashen gray paths on her cheeks and she is nineteen when she is forced to see the man she once thought of as a brother seize the life out of her Osroes, moved by the remnants of the adoration he once gave her.
She is nineteen when she is forced to kneel with burned nightclothes in the pool made of his blood, when she grovels at Andragoras’ feet and begs with crimson stains in her ivory hairs for him to let the child she bore to Osroes live, to spare the last piece of her once golden future. She begs despite the thundering fury which crowd her heart chanting it isn’t fair, she begs and cries and promise to be his bride before the sun rise if he would only see her son and not think of him as a threat.
Andragoras agrees. She will be his bride and he will be her groom despite how revulsing the idea is to her, because she is a mother before she is a woman. Because Angragoras allowed her child to live, because in the aftermath of the coup, when she sits at the edge of the marital bed she shared with Osroes and stares with disgust at the ivory ring on her finger, she can still see a maidservant applying balm on her son’s burned face next to her.
Osroes named him Hilmes the night he was born. Hilmes, the dweller on the hill.
A tender way for a smitten man to echo the day of their first fateful meeting, on the hills of Pars.
