Nuada faces west; he follows scudding, feverish winds and paces the ending of the day as a kind of penance. It is the last, the last. The last day spent in his father's favour, the last light of elfmark pressed as a blessing to his brow; twilight of the prince's power, spilling red as berry blossoms and the blood of mortals across his hand. Everlasting, once. Now it persists only if he moves with it.
He walks woodland paths unimpeded; the brush still bows open at his feet respectfully. He breathes the scent of dry decay under new growth and he studies the canopy, sees it clashing with overripe plenty. Summer swells heavily against its colourful stitches; bird tails clipping in and out of sunbeams, petals blinking benign at his passage, cicada notes ringing brash and brassy overhead like shields hung as cymbals in peacetime. He sees opulence, casual waste where he expects to find the kind of spareness that is cut out of warmaking. The world, it seems, has not troubled itself with the choosing of sides.
Nuada thinks: that, too, is a choice.
With hunter's eyes, he tracks the long seams, the slats between seasons. He finds them and he obliges them to remember his authority; they bend for him. Even on the cusp of exile, he is the heir apparent and his will is an unseen force in the worldworks. There is a petulant swell of autumn-before-its-time and then leaves are curling in the fires of old age, they are coming down around him like a rain of rust and the forest twists its black fingers up, shorn and slim, in the signs of melancholy. Such poets, the trees. They write laments in latticework script all along the gleaming scroll of the sky, they say: the prince. the prince. he does not look us in the eye. he will cast us from his sight. he burns us to cinders and strikes the cinders into the wind and the wind carries us away. the prince. it is in his nature, we understand.
Harsh judgment, he thinks. He has only held them accountable for apathy, not torn them from the sink of their root; they are not in pain.
He faces west and the sun is before him, bloating dark on the horizon like a tulip bulb drowned and rotted by spring floods. Perpetual sunset; dusk is a night-blooming flower. There is true immortality in that thought, and a trembling terror, and wickedness. Cycles are sacred. He knows that he traces a delicate fissure in the ancient laws by toying with the balance of light and dark hours in his life, by cheating inheritance and the turning of the world. But cycles are also inexorable. A spring and an autumn. A rise and a fall. Forests crumble to wastelands; cities can do the same. He upholds the old ways, he remembers. It is an honour to be the thread that closes the loop; it will be, it has been, it is always being.
The trees whisper amongst themselves. He hears the warning. Treacherously, his heart opens like a crow's wing, rises to meet the pitch of a battle song, and the falling leaves cry out:
fire visits the earth where it falls beneath the prince's shadow. beware of his hand and eye. destruction haunts his footsteps.
Nuada faces west and watches the sun drown in darkness. His shadow falls behind him. It stretches toward the distant slip of the horizon like a reaching hand until, at last, it curls against the stillwater gloss of sky, of starlight reaching back to him, and is lost in the night.
For Empatheia, a nymph in all the forests of the world.
Hellboy II, Nuada: ashes to ashes.