A city on our shoulders [Maks, Amadeus, and Pax]

Pax hated nighttime in the palace. The architecture's vast interiors, so bright and seemingly weightless by day, contained expansive nothingness at night. The vaulted ceilings were invisible beyond the gloom, leaving him anxious under the threat of infinite space. It was too dark to move, and too quiet to sleep. Every sound --the king or his pet shifting in their carefree slumber, or a distant hoof on a distant sidewalk-- struck him like a knife. He found himself holding his breath for what felt like hours, braced for unknown danger while his eyes invented shapes in the dark.

Sometimes dawn, with its periwinkle shadows and birdsong, brought him rest. Amadeus would rise soon after sleep found Pax, rouse him with a smile, and call him lazy in a way that wasn't meant to infuriate him the way it did. Pax would hold his tongue, and go through another day dragging his insomnia behind him like an anvil.

Pax hadn't seen the inside of the fighting pits in months, but they still owned him. He used to sleep in the crowded heat of the stable, pressed between a changing roster of bodies, the low ceiling and tight quarters creating a heavy blanket of white noise. The guard's lantern at the door kept the room gently amber. When the rainbow of the palace turned black at night, Pax missed that subtle glow, even missed the knees and elbows that had made up his mattress, and the knowledge that he rested among dozens of others who shared his fate.

Who shared his fate now?

He had inherited a soft bed, fine silks, and a place behind the king. They had burned his papers of ownership before a cheering crowd and knighted him while there was still blood on his chest, sand on his legs, tears on his cheeks. Pax was paraded around an arena still littered with combatants who had been intended to die, and given a new life beside the king he so resembled. It was Valore's favorite story, for a few hours. It had everything they liked: A dramatic finish, a merciful king, an honorable fighter.

Pax didn't feel honorable. He spent his long nights panting in silence and trying to figure out how he had been the last one standing that day. He was small. He had a losing record. He had barely fought, he'd frozen, and yet, when the dust cleared and he had grappled the life from another terrified fighter, he'd been the only one left.

Pax knew there were no coincidences. He felt like every slave who looked at him since that day knew it, too.

Dawn didn't bring him rest today. As the room swelled with purple light, he looked with tired eyes at the king. Across the room, he slept fitfully, for once, agitated in his dream. The pygmy dragon Finnian watched defensively as Pax rose from where he lay on the floor, feet away from the too-soft bed he never occupied. Pax slipped out without a word. The chevalier posted outside the king's bedchamber ignored him once she determined it was merely the king's double who had come through the door.

Pax turned to the courtyard, his favorite place when he could be alone. He'd learned to fly in the tight spaces of enclosed arenas, and occasionally liked to walk beneath the sky, and imagine what it would be like to fly without a ceiling. His clipped wings couldn't grow back fast enough.

He greeted a young servile slave who skittered immediately out of sight, and frowned all the way to the courtyard. One of the city's slaves was at work there, and Pax tried to place him in his memory. He knew so many from his journeys to the Dark District, but the older fellow wasn't familiar. He watched him only for a moment, admiring the work he was accomplishing on his lonesome, before making his way down the steps to him.

Devoid of any ornamentation, his wings clipped, his body lean, and his skin scarred, Pax was distinguishable from the help only by his clean mane and lack of a brand. It was enough to keep him in a liminal space, not a slave but not a native here, either. He longed for honest toil. "Can I help?" he asked, voice raw from a sleepless night.