The Academy: only if you say three words.

This, then, is her beginning: the slow hum of water and birds, stones and secrets won and lost, and the promise of eternity kept in the hallowed gates like ancient angels to guard time and them. He listens with the dark cusp of an ear to the birdsong like sweet lullaby drifting across the lake and painting their memories; these, here, the scuff of a hoof against stone and the bitter taste of flowers in winter-time, are what they remember as they reminisce, but not what history writes in its books as it tells its own tales. History remembers, instead, the black stallion and charred mare, the way he drowned and died and lived for her; history remembers they way they are broken and alive, full and dead, at peace in chaos and at chaos in peace – it remembers the disharmonies they sing in the rain, and little else. History will remember her beginning, this slow, sad, shallow pond, because all beginnings have an end; and it will remember, too, the dark monolith’s beginning, far away from here. It will remember the slow turn of desert, the heat nothing like She knows, even now; it will remember the rise and fall of Them, as all things – and it will wonder at how this, then, is his end, so subtle and wry, when he was crafted from such voracious beginnings. But the beast does not smile; he only looks upon his reflection, broken in the reflecting pool, inhaling the rhythm of Up and Down, and listening to the song of things with guarded tact.

He hears her voice like a clear bell on the water and still does not stir. The empty eyes stare back at him through half-broken reflections with all the apathy and discontent of the ages, unwavering in their stoic aptitude for grace and malevolence at once: even now, as she would break beside him and find him broken, too, not now but always, he can not remove the mask of stone. She would not understand the length to which he is broken; she would not, because she had not known him then, when he was the pinnacle of desert godliness and they would swear him up and down a king – not as here, because he earned it, but there, because he lived for it. She would not, because she did not know him when he stood on the dunes of sand and would cast his gaze of malevolence over the valleys etched by tides, and they would be beckoned by the single motion of a thought and breath on the wind; they did not need magic, there, for magic things to happen. So, no – she would understand, now, how or why he is broken; he knows this, even as he gazes quietly down, staring at the shell of his former self; and he cannot tell her, here or anywhere, why he has become this. Even in loathing, he could not break her to heal himself.

“No,” he murmurs to the quiet and watches his voice skip across the pond; “there is no such thing as darkness.” Still he does not turn, but his eyes level out over the water and watch the light falling over the horizon there. Dawn comes quickly upon them, and they are beautiful for it, washed in the golden light of the early morn as few late risers ever know. “There are only thoughts and our beliefs, and they would make the imagined real.” He lets his head hang low and his dark, yearning mouth drag across the still lake, and watches with mild interest as the water shifts and turns around him, but does not ripple with the agony of something pure now tainted. “When will you learn?” he whispers, more to himself, and, in agony, rests his nose against the shore.

A pause, and then – daringly – “I never hated you.”