V

Josh woke up to a panging pain at the back of his head, and a feeling of a cold, hard surface beneath his body. He tried to move, but each movement brought him discomfort, as his side felt stiff and bruised, like he had been tossed around violently while he was out, and he had been laying in place for hours.

He felt around with his hand to help himself sit up, and found the surface beneath him was cool, smoothed out rock. 

Once he was upright, he tried opening his eyes, though all he could see were three orbs of bright yellow light as the pain in his head intensified, and he closed them back shut. Eventually, after a few moments, he was able to pry his eyes open, and see that the light was coming from three large bonfires: one to both his left and right, a few metres before where he was sitting, as well as one elevated above them, on what looked to be a raised slab of rock with stone stairs leading up to it, at the far end of the chamber, all immaculately chiselled with mechanical craftsmanship.

Josh was sitting in a large cave, whose sole illumination came from the three bonfires, and thus did not allow him to see its walls, which were concealed by a thick, pitch-black darkness.

After a moment of his eyes adjusting, he could see figures at the edge of the fires, standing on the precipice of what was visible, and the bounding void that stretched beyond. The figures appeared to be of people, some thirty or forty of them, all wearing the same brown robes, with sleeves stretching down covering their hands, and hoods draped over their heads concealing their faces. A static silence dominated the cave, with the faint crackling of the bonfires audible just above it, and Josh felt paralysed, uncertain what to do.

Joshua dared not move a muscle, lest he disturb his ominous surroundings and they turn against him. He sat in silence, till a sudden noise startled him, and he flinched.

‘He’s awake,’ said a voice from within the group.

Josh still had not come completely to his senses, and the acoustics of the cave further distorted the speech, but he was nearly certain the voice belonged to Adam.

A single robed individual broke off from the right perimeter, and slowly ambled over to Josh, who sat motionless as it approached. The rest of the people did not react in the slightest, and might as well have been standing statues.

The figure reached Josh and stopped a metre before him, extending its hand out to him, seemingly for him to take, as though it was mutely beckoning him to come and follow.

Josh was still too puzzled to move, and sat without budging or letting out a sound.

‘Come,’ eventually commanded the figure, startling Josh once more, and allowing him to identify with certainty that it was indeed Adam speaking.

Notwithstanding their previous altercations, in an environment so frighteningly foreign, Joshua was relieved to hear any familiar voice; which, combined with the looming pressure for him to react in some way, finally pushed him into motion, and he creaked his battered limbs into a standing position.

The figure – which under the hood Joshua knew to be Adam – lowered its arm and slowly turned around, and began creeping in the direction of the bonfire at the far end of the cave. 

Lagging slightly in his reaction, Josh followed it. The two walked between the two bonfires, behind which Josh could see the other robed individuals, differing in their dimensions – of different heights and widths, with some having wider hips and other wider shoulders – but otherwise indistinguishable behind their identical brown garbs.

When they passed the bonfires, Josh realised the stone platform at the far end of the cave was much farther away than his dazed perception led him to believe, and understood the distant stage must have been a megalith, and the bonfire burning on it colossal. The faint patter of footsteps could be heard behind them, and Joshua turned around to see all the hooded figures following them, matching their pace like some orchestral march. From hearing the sound of the steps on the cave floor and seeing the feet moving beneath the robes, Josh noticed that each figure was barefoot, which actuated him to check if all his clothes were left on his person while he was unconscious; and he was relieved to find everything was as he had worn it before, though his pockets were emptied, and he was missing his phone.

This sent his thoughts back to Owen, and his cautionary words of reason, as well as those he had thought himself, which he desperately wished he would have followed. He wondered how much time had passed since he was last conscious, and where he could possibly be that would house such an expansive cave without the slightest professional supervision. The enormity of the chamber crushed his soul with awe, and every fleeting wish to start running and escape was snuffed by the senselessness of such a task; the shadows that stretched beyond the flickers of light were not physical walls, but ones to his mind, and he could not dare produce the mechanical movements to breach himself from their confines. All he knew to do was follow the horde of strangers, and pray the inferno they were pilgrimaging towards was not intended to consume him.

As they approached closer to the fire, Joshua could just barely make out a figure sitting before the raging flames. It appeared to be another robed member of the congregation, their legs crossed as they waited patiently for the rest of the group to come to them.

Eventually, the group reached the steps that led up to the stone platform. The air around them had become increasingly heated as they came nearer and nearer to the giant, nearly solar fire, and Joshua started sweating a little bit under his two layers of clothing. Adam stopped at the base of the first step, where he turned around and waited for the rest of the group, which, much like they had done at the two smaller fires, disbanded from their dense cluster and formed a crescent shape that faced the stone platform, surrounding Joshua and trapping him among them. With the stronger light of the larger fire, Josh was able to barely see the bottom half of each person’s face, though the hoods were still successful in concealing the distinguishing upper features.

Once everyone was in their place, Adam scaled the first few stone steps, where he turned to face everyone below him, and with what must have been his deepest, most reaching voice, he spoke:

‘Behold, my fellow Omnists, the presence of our most distinguished, most divine; the chaos of our world, within whom we find our order; the nothing that surrounds us, that we let consume us, to make us whole, to make us something; bow down before your Queen Nia!’

The crescent of followers dropped to their knees and bowed before Joshua and Adam, stretching their arms completely forward and dropping their hooded heads so low they nearly touched the ground. 

But Joshua was paying them no attention, for he had just in that moment connected the dots – quite literally – in his mind, and he was regarding with a fixed stare the beckoned Queen Nia, who rose from her place on the ground and walked to the top of the steps. Once there, she lifted her arms, about to remove her concealing hood, but in his heart, Joshua already knew who he would see.

With regal grace, the Queen removed her hood, to reveal the young, enchanting face of Natasha, shiny from sweat and tinted orange from the raging blaze behind her.

Joshua could hardly believe his eyes, as he stared paralysed at the gorgeous, innocent presence he had helped around the school not that long ago. Natasha looked down onto him, their eyes meeting, and that mesmerising smile she had given Josh from the top of the school stairs found itself on her lips once again.

Her beauty on the background of the living flames set Joshua’s mind into a dazzled state of wonder. Her hair was completely drenched by sweat, clearly from sitting so close to the fire for a long time – presumably she had been sitting there from even before Josh had woken up – and she shone like a nymph born from the idyllic waters of Eden. Her eyes were like glistening beads of pearly hope in the abyssal darkness of the cave, and beyond anything and everything else, her caressing smile crippled any feelings of fear or terror Josh might have been feeling, being propelled into such an enigmatic situation which demanded all his willpower not to crumble beneath; her face told him she understood, that all would be fine, and he would have to bear his worries no longer.

Natasha – the Queen, for she had every regal air about her – walked down the slabbed steps, gracefully gliding on their smooth surface. She passed by Adam, who bowed his head as she walked in front of him, and met with Joshua at the very bottom, maintaining eye contact with him the entire way. 

‘Hello, Joshua,’ she said, in her particular cadence of saying his name. The words seemed as though they were meant only for his own ears, and that despite the unnaturally absurd scenario they found themselves in, it was as if they were the only people there, and nothing surreal was actually happening.

Joshua wanted to greet her in kind, but the overwhelming enormity of everything that was happening had sapped him of any power of speech, and he could only stand there, his mouth slightly ajar, without any words spilling out of it. Natasha seemed to understand, or at least whatever feelings she really had were concealed beneath her ever unchanging expression, and without saying anything more, she looked away from Josh, and walked back up next to Adam on the steps. She turned back to look upon her bowing subjects, none of whom had moved in the slightest since adopting their places on the floor.

‘We are here today,’ she spoke out in her mysterious, unplaceable accent, ‘because one of our members has brought to my knowledge a possible threat to his position as Arch Writer.’

She turned to look at Adam, who was still bowing his head, and could not be seen reacting to her words in any way.

‘One of our followers,’ she continued, facing everyone who was bowing, ‘has told me of a potential writer, whose skills in the literary arts, both prosaic and poetic, might just exceed his own.’

Natasha extended her arm towards Joshua and looked him in the eyes. Her palm was facing upwards, as if she was giving him her hand from an unreachable distance, and Josh understood she was beckoning him to come forward. Taking a brief, uncertain look around him, Josh locked eyes with the Queen, and approached to meet her on the steps. He took his place on the side without Adam, from where he looked down on the bowing followers. Natasha’s presence allowed him to find comfort in indefinite security, which let him feel a certain warming power standing in such a position; him by her side, and everyone else below them.

‘My child of Iu,’ continued the Queen, turning now to speak to Adam, ‘is this him, whom you suppose greater than yourself?’

Adam looked up, his face completely visible from the light of the flames. He looked past Natasha, and regarded Joshua with a sly, sinister glare, which he accompanied with a corresponding crooked smirk.

‘This is him, our Majesty Nia,’ he said, returning his eyes to Natasha and dropping any malicious features from his face, adopting a near humble expression. ‘This is him whom I fear to be greater than myself, and who I suspect might be appropriate in taking my place within our congregation. I have been witness to his talents and potential, and if anyone is right in spreading the word of Iu, it should surely be the fittest of wit, to which he might be closer than myself.’

‘I completely agree,’ said the Queen, whose stern expression communicated with what severity she was treating the situation. ‘And you, who call yourself Joshua, what might you say for yourself regarding such declarations?’

The onus was once more on Joshua to speak up, but no matter the comfort he felt inside Natasha’s magical aura, something in the dominating ethos of the cave did not permit him to speak. The words he wanted to say travelled to the top of his throat, where they stopped and refused to go any further. All he could do was repeat his same gaping expression.

But his mouth being open, whether words were leaving it or not, was clearly sufficient to communicate to Natasha exactly what she wanted to hear.

‘You are speechless at such an appraisal, I know,’ she said, ‘it is not just any poet you are being said to outrank, but that of our current vessel of Iu, who himself has communicated many of Iu’s prophecies and words for us to follow, and has helped shape and craft the newest generation of our inveterate faith.’

Joshua was starting to realise what Adam had done, setting him up to fail in an arena where he knew he could defeat him. The peace he felt at Natasha’s side was becoming only superficial, and he began to worry once more what his fate could be if he was exposed as the lesser writer, as he inevitably would be. Even if he wanted to contend, he had nothing with him to provide, no stories nor poetry, no matter how inadequate, which he could read out to be criticised. 

He felt helpless, but a singular serenity came to him with this realisation of vulnerability. The whole circus, everything from the robes, to the fire and how they spoke to one another, and even the ominous cave, everything just felt so comical to him at that moment. He realised that no matter how lathered the predicament was with menacing imagery, and no matter what bowing identities the brown hoods concealed, the true, objective reality that he had before him was that this group of people, apparently united in their beliefs, of some sort or another, were being ruled by a teenage girl, and were giving both time and reception to the opinions of Adam, who perhaps looked like he might live in a cave, but should certainly never have been praised in one.

The realisation helped Josh relax. It lifted any intimidating air from his surroundings. He looked before him, and saw forty or so people, laying uncomfortably on their knees in dirty brown robes. He was standing on a set of stone steps with a ruffled teenager, who was likely put on a watchlist the day he was born, just to be safe, and to his right, no matter how strikingly beautiful she might have been, Joshua saw a young, innocent girl, who was completely drenched from head to toe in sweat, because she sat next to a fire for a stupidly long time.

Joshua let out a sigh of relief, and smiled humbly to himself. Whatever the circumstances, he could not help his feelings towards Natasha, no matter how ridiculously she spent her free time, and he decided to play along however he needed to in order to get closer to her, even to just spend more time by her side. He also made a mental note in his mind to press charges against Adam later, when the whole situation was resolved, because no matter what esoteric good might come from it, Adam had in fact assaulted him, and if that wasn’t enough, he also kidnapped him, and took him to a cave, which should award him a few additional years just for creepiness.

‘And so,’ the Queen continued, ‘it is only right that we compare the two poets, head to head, by juxtaposing two of their finest works.’ 

The cave silently concurred with its Queen.

‘Come, child,’ she said, turning to Adam, ‘let your poetic heart sing, how we know so well it can.’ – ‘You can stay bowing for this,’ she added to her other followers, almost like an afterthought, completely losing any severity in her voice when issuing the plain command.

Adam listened to Natasha’s call and obeyed it. He removed his hood, presenting a muddied, dirty face to the light of the fire, also wet, though not so drastically as Natasha, from sweat. He straightened his posture to bring more air into his lungs, and with the composure of one who had practised the routine many times before, he began eloquating his poetic opus.

The whole cave fell silent as it listened to Adam’s verse. Joshua was intrigued by what the dishevelled teen could produce, and listened carefully to the words. 

Although he was not capable of judging himself, on account of his diminutive poetic knowledge, it did seem to him as though there was some merit to what he was saying, and had he not been struck by him before or predisposed to eternally hating all his being, Joshua might have even admitted the poem sounded somewhat pleasant, or at least had the structure one might expect from a poetic creation – a structure, he thought, that was entirely absent from anything he himself had ever made. 

There was a musical rhythm to it, that sang without instruments, and only by the melody that was brought by the words; there was rhyme in parts, but not too much to remove from the more narrative elements, which produced a magnificent epic with many qualities of a masterful work; but beyond any of that, behind any analysis an expert poet could provide on the many facets of the craft present in Adam’s work, it was simply enjoyable to listen to, which, at its heart, was what most poetry aimed to bring, and which Adam’s poem succeeded in doing, even in his most opposing critic. Put simply, the poem was good, perhaps even brilliant, and it brought new optimism to what he might have done in the thousands of pages he had handed up to Ms. Abigail.

Adam finished his poem in great time and great style, and had everyone’s hands not been placed flat down on the ground in incessant worship, they likely would have clapped at the most agreeable display. Even Joshua felt like applauding right at the end, for so fine was Adam’s delivery; but he did not. 

The conclusion of the excellent poem helped Josh finalise the acceptance that there was simply no hope in this avenue of approach, that there was no sense ridiculing himself in front of so many strangers – in front of Natasha – and he would need to simply come clean about his poetic shortcomings, and reach the girl’s heart by some other means.

‘That was excellent,’ said the Queen, after a short appreciative pause, ‘truly some of your finest work. I just adored the journey of words and thought, how you so finely crafted a creation so succinctly concise in delivering the greatest, most potent of pleasure; but we will not dwell on it, for now it is time for you, Joshua, to bless us with your words, and allow us to conclude which of you is the finer poet, and which deserves to carry on as the vessel of Iu, the one and only entity. For this, let us stand, as anything novel should be appreciated as it is, in its purest form, and that can only be done from an idle stance.’

Dismissing the nonsensical particularities of Natasha’s words, Josh digested the opportunity before him, and started in his mind to articulate the precise means he would convey the disappointing reality: that he was no poet, and there wasn’t the slightest point in him pretending to be one. 

He watched the robed followers stand up after their long kneel – relieved, he imagined – and face towards the three of them standing on the steps, resuming the ominous, mute crescent they had arrived in. The acute rustles of their movements concluded, leaving the crackling flames to once more reclaim the audio of the cave. The floor was his to speak up. It was his turn to talk, and everyone around him was listening attentively for what he would say.

The glaring expectation reignited Joshua’s overwhelming anxiety, though not the one of oppressing doom he had borne up until his tranquilising realisation; instead, Josh had been comically struck with stagefright. It prevented him from speaking, disgruntling his thoughts in a spiralling mess, which he was tasked with regrouping and reordering into something that made intelligible sense. 

The whole cave suspended in attendance, but no one would stir until Joshua spoke. It was his moment, and they would give him all the time in the world.

It took fifteen seconds of dense, undisturbed silence, but finally Joshua was able to contrive a sufficiently elegant explanation for the whole predicament. Well, here’s the thing, is how it would start, and all remaining reason would flow from there.

‘Well,’ he said before pausing, the nerves he thought he had tamed constricting him further. He tried, but could not continue beyond the sole utterance.

There was a gentle, burly grunt that could be heard in the pause, followed by a loud thump on the floor of the cave. Josh turned to see what it was. One of the worshippers was laying on the ground – one of those with wider shoulders – with two others coming from their flanks to their aid.

‘Beautiful,’ said Natasha, ‘simply divine,’ with seemingly no attention to the downed individual. ‘How perfectly concise. So beautiful, in fact, that you have caused one of our fellows to faint from overwhelming awe. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything quite like it – no, I’m sure I have not.’

With a smooth, almost mechanical spin, she turned and directed her gaze to the fellow on the ground, who was still as motionless as a corpse on the flickering cave floor. Giving no more than three seconds’ empathy, she turned back to Joshua, whose frozen expression did not adjust to his reacquainted confusion. 

Had they misheard him? he wondered, or was the praise, somehow, despite him being the sole voice in the expansive cavern, directed at someone else; someone who had indeed shared something laudable and worthy of admiration?

‘Your encapsulation of such an expanse of emotions and thoughts into a single word; the pacing, the tempo, the rhythm of it – to contain a musical harmony, a musical symphony, in but a single syllable; to tame the fruit of the heart, namely feeling, and not to enslave it, but to guide it into its own, autonomous self-submission, chaining its own arms and legs into the confines of only four letters and a breath; that is something I have never thought possible, and am restraining myself from expressing feeling to it too, for though my body stands strong before you, I assure you my soul has met much a similar a fate as our comrade here: utterly paralysed on the ground from overwhelming admiration.’ Natasha said, answering his doubts in possibly the most elaborate way imaginable. Nonetheless, Joshua could still not help feel disbelief at what she was saying, and he could not understand how his utterance could ever be construed in the evolved way the Queen had received it.

‘How you,’ continued Natasha, ‘managed to outline in your one word all our hesitation towards the world, all our fears and our struggles, all our hearts in the face of romance and our minds on the final step of indecision. You have captured, I feel, the word that precedes all our greatest hopes, and marks the doors into the next chapters of our lives, like a declaration of change propelled from the catalyst of acceptance. And that you could say it like a poet, too, embracing and enacting the powerful emotions from within you and dispersing them into the world with honest breath, earnestly and credibly, not but reciting the word, but living the art itself, like ripping a beating heart from the ribcage of quotidian life.’

For all the words she could throw at him, none of this helped Joshua much in understanding what had previously confused him, and continued to confuse him about the inherently puzzling predicament. That his expression did not change seemed now an established universal constant, though with close inspection, one was still able to catch the diminishing sanity resting behind his glistening, flame-sparked eyes.

Behind Natasha – at least from where Joshua was standing – an increasingly irate Adam was becoming visibly agitated by the Queen’s words of praise, which he justly considered deranged and detached from reality, and his crimson face appeared to cage the energy of a fourth, largest bonfire within the cave.

‘What are you talking about?’ he said curtly, without the proper decorum he had been maintaining hitherto. ‘He only said a word! How can you possibly call that art? Call that poetry? Have you gone mad?!’

In the unmoving robed figures, whose faces still could not be seen, there was an immediate tension in response to Adam’s complete disrespect to their majesty, and there seemed to be a common air of anticipation as everyone attentively scrutinised for the Queen’s reciprocal opprobrium. But Natasha remained calm and unperturbed by Adam’s insolence, and turned to him slowly with royal serenity.

‘And how long it took for him to come up with it, too!’ Adam added, clearly interrupting Natasha before she could even speak. ‘So much wait, so much ado, for him to say one word, and go quiet again? Unbelievable.’

Adam’s brazenness was even more impressive when uttered directly to the Queen’s face, and his – admittedly unnecessary and clumsy – words carried additional gravity in shaping Natasha’s response. It could not be seen by anyone but Adam, but there was a slight pique in her expression after hearing his subsequent arrogance, and something seemed to change within her perception of him, something that altered the regard in her sparkling eyes for her impertinent subject. Adam could not help but feel it had somehow altered his fate in the face of his Queen, as a sharp chill struck down his spine. Nonetheless, Natasha maintained equanimity, and did not release a well-deserved censure unto the feeble teen.

‘You are clearly misguided, child,’ she said with strict serenity, a frigid undertone adding with each word a stinging blow, like that of a striking whip. ‘Had you had your ears open, you would have heard the articulate poetic perfection our friend Joshua had procured, and since you clearly did not, you will never now experience like we have the indescribable sensation of such raw, poetic splendour. And as for the time it took to produce it…’

Natasha glanced around her shoulder at Joshua, a certain wonder in her eyes as she looked at him, as though she was not viewing a man, but rather beholding a divine creation.

‘The mind is right beside the mouth,’ she said, turning back towards Adam, ‘it takes no time for words to travel from the mind out into the world. But the heart…’ she placed her right hand upon her heart, and looked over at Joshua once again, ‘But the heart is so much farther away, it takes time for the pure, untarnished words to travel from the heart to the mouth, and it was this time that we had to push through in order to climax at a point so shakingly significant. What we experienced was not silence: it was the journey of poetic excellence, and we are fortunate that the journey should have concluded in our own lifetimes, and we would have been alive to experience it at all.’

Adam felt stupefied at such disproportionate adulation for the sheer nothing that had been said by Joshua, and, perhaps for the first time in their mutual existence, in that moment the two of them were of identical thought and mind. He could not produce any further words for the hopeless madness before him, and through his muteness he recognised that the madness had no novelty to it: it was the same madness he had always known, he had simply never been on this side of it. The two adversaries could have been one another’s reflections in the mirror, with Natasha dividing them like an illuminating looking glass.

‘And so I am done with you,’ she said in an ordering tone, ‘return to the ranks now’ she declared, and Adam obeyed without protest, starting to walk sullenly down the chiselled steps.

‘But keep yourself known’ she added coldly, with a stare that Adam did not have to turn around to feel piercing into him. He continued down to where the rest of the robed members were aligned, and ambled over to the far left of the group, passing by the member who was still incapacitated. He established himself at the edge, without reapplying his hood, such that he could be easily distinguished from the rest of the mob.

Natasha followed him with her gaze as he marched away.

‘Now,’ said Natasha once Adam retired, turning and prancing over to Joshua, who had not dared budge through the internal friction. The two locked eyes, an intimate longing shining in Natasha’s as she searched for similar feeling in Joshua. Presumably she found some, or at least imagined to, because her own admiration did not wane in the entangling gaze, and she remained standing enamoured for what felt like ever-expanding minutes. A careful expectation seemed to mount around them with every passing second, like there was a volcano inside the young girl’s bosom that was only Pascals away from bursting.

‘Now!’ she echoed, with a jovial force that woke the walls of the cave, who could not help but repeat her words. She turned to the masked congregation once again, and raised her arms in vivacious glee.

‘Now I believe we have found our new King!’

The crowd of followers burst into an encore of cheers, though they did not stir from their spots on the ground, which they held with established significance. 

The words were unexpected and sudden, but juxtaposed with everything else that was alien in his most lucid state, Joshua found them unnaturally natural, and they flowed into his conscious as reasonably as any assertion of clear, irrefutable fact. He did not question them, and accepted them for what they were.

The Queen leapt and cheered with immature joy, losing entirely her grave disposition, and seemingly returning to a time of infantile happiness that possessed her throughout. She jumped over to Joshua, whom she could not get to hop alongside herself, and guided him up to the top of the steps and onto the stage, where the fire had diminished to producing a bearable amount of warmth. She looked him deeply in the eyes once again.

‘Oh, how I’m so happy we could have found each other once again, Te’o!’ she said, a grin spreading the width of her face, shifting into pressed lips that jumped onto Joshua’s face to deliver a kiss onto his dry, unexpecting mouth. ‘I knew you were right, I knew you were right all along! Iu would unite us, and here you are! Here you are!’ she added, but Josh was a little absent to hear her distant words.

Two things had surprised the dazzled teen, the more significant of the two being the more obvious; though he could not help but feel briefly cheated, and undeniably puzzled as to how Natasha had confused his name with one so alienly different.

‘Oh! But one more matter!’ she said, catching herself in the midst of her joyful celebration, and redonning the disposition of official regality she bore as Queen. ‘We have not covered the most important of all questions! Our masterful poet, do you accept this coronation?’

The cave found silence once again as Josh was recast into anxious expectation. His neck felt lubricated, allowing him to look around after being transported from one place to another like a mannequin. He looked down at the girl before him – the Queen. Natasha’s eyes looked like they grew in diameter by a few centimetres of desperate hope, like the entire future of her happiness was crutching on what Josh would say next, and any illusion he might have had of free will only made space for him to give one right answer.

Josh did in fact consider the options before him. Disregarding the equivocal, and at least possibly dangerous, consequences of him refusing to become King, whatever it should entail from him, there was an undeniable fancy fluttering within him that whispered thoughts of possibly wanting to become King, which in his immediate understanding bore precisely that significance that he would have thought it to. He regarded the beautiful creature that stood before him, entirely submissive, entirely his, and he gazed over the line of attentive followers who radiated servitude, and who seemed to be projecting any freedom and autonomy they possessed onto him, and into his grasp. It felt empowering, bringing a newfound vitality into his chest and sparking new desires of grandeur he had never felt within him before. 

Could it be, he thought, that this was his place? The possibility did not feel in any way abstract, as it would have not that long ago. He looked the Queen – his Queen – into her mesmerising eyes.

‘I accept the coronation,’ he said, with clear, unfettered syllables. He felt liberated from any fear that pestered him hitherto: he felt strong – he felt King.

A cheerful smile grew on Natasha’s face, but she did not resume her jubilee. She was once more calm; once more the composed, dignified Queen that led her people, whoever they were, and she had to set an example for them.

‘I therefore coronate you as Chio, King of the Omnists, husband to Queen Nia, and undeniable centre to Iu, the amorphous whole, from which all is born,’ she pronounced with ritualistic significance. She gave Joshua a last look of joy, which, without words, he knew served as his crown. 

There was no fanfare, no parading trumpets or celebratory march to applaud the new King; without any further ceremony, the matter was concluded, and he was crowned the newly established king of an organisation he knew nothing about, bearing a title he didn’t begin to comprehend with an immaterial crown on his lightheaded scalp. The situation seemed as though in a dream, distant but right within his reach, and any feelings, both prospective and ominous, were intangible and ephemeral. The only thought he could hold onto was the frail acknowledgement that he now had Natasha, the Queen was in his grasp, and anything beyond that mattered little, no matter the looming obscurity. Joshua stretched a superficial smile on his hopeless lips.

A moment of serenity elapsed in the newborn kingdom. At the end of it, a cold expression sprouted on Natasha’s face as she slowly reclaimed the centre of the stage, the fire behind her; the Queen facing her people.

‘And him,’ she shouted, pointing her right hand at Adam, without deigning to toss him but a glance. 

‘We will be eating his head tonight!’

19.IV.22

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