#!fe8

---

"You wished to see these chambers?"

"I did." Ephraim's words are clipped, cut to the quick. "I wished to see them alone."

"I will retire, then," Knoll says. The only thing keeping him from fading back into the shadows without a sound is the understanding that this prince would need a warning. Ephraim exhales hard through his nose, a sigh he had started to repress, only to give up and let it free. The sigh shakes the dust from its resting place, and Knoll thinks, this man would have made a poor mage.

What had he learned in Renais, if he had not been taught to breathe so shallowly, so subtly, that he would almost appear dead, all for the sake of preserving some delicate spell? Even now, Ephraim's eyes do not take easily to the darkness, but nor does it pain him to step into the sunlight, the way it pains Knoll. Perhaps he and the sun are kin, then, harsh and radiant enough to leave permanent spots etched into one's vision, should they stare too long. Knoll tears his faintly-aching eyes from that light, and wishes that Prince Lyon could have done the same. He will not let Ephraim linger everywhere he looks.

Ephraim orders roughly, "Come, then," as he sits on what was once Prince Lyon's bed. He has the look of a man lowering himself into his own grave, and in that respect, he and Knoll are a fitting pair.

Knoll still does not believe in sacrilege. Even something so obscene as this seems more like a mild indulgence, in the face of what he has done (what both of them have done). What he does now is--a stopgap. This is merely the placing of bandages over a still-oozing wound, as if rotting is a mere illness that will run its course. He clutches at the sheets and feels dust cling to his palms, like attracted to like. What Ephraim thinks, Knoll does not guess. He knows the shape of it, if not the words.

Ephraim is loud as always, a crescendoing, winding concerto of moans and oaths, hissed out from between his clenched teeth.

"Lyon," and he grinds it out again and again, like a dull blade across a whetstone.

Out of habit, Knoll makes no noise, save for the occasional, muffled groan. These come only when Ephraim thrusts as though he means to drive the air from Knoll's lungs and out into the dead space hanging between them. One such groan escapes him now, and doubtless, Ephraim does not hear. Subtlety is not this prince's strong suit.

And yet, he remembers--you oughtn't mumble, kind words from a young man whose hands, whose lips so often trembled. You oughtn't mumble. What would I do, were you to pronounce a word wrongly in our spells, only to find yourself turned into ash and bones? I need you too much for that, Knoll.

"Prince Lyon," then, from Knoll's lips into the sheets where his prince (or what lurked inside the shell of his prince) had once lain. Perfectly enunciated, unmistakable.

Ephraim drives on.

There is no closing his eyes and exchanging the body of one prince for the ghost of another. No act of transmutation could turn Ephraim's body and voice, tense and warm and alive, into Prince Lyon's, soft as velvet on a trophy stag's head gone to rot. The bed groans under their combined weight, slight as Knoll's own contribution may be. He thinks of his prince, in between heady surges that leave him feeling not quite a part of himself. Prince Lyon's own body, empty and buried under stone. Knoll fancies himself and Ephraim much the same, here, rutting at one another while passing a dead man's name between their mouths.

They share it, Lyon, Prince Lyon, like it is the last air left in their drowning lungs.