How strange that a dead thing should feel such a vicious ache.
It had taken up residence in a valley between his ribs sometime in the night.
If he still breathed perhaps it would have arrested the air in his chest, hitched it in his throat.
Alas, he did not breathe and the pain itself was a phantom. Because dead things cannot feel pain. At least not the physical kind.
(How fiercely he has felt emotional pain, the only kind of pain that has ever taken him to his knees.)

He does not know why he took to walking. Except that, perhaps, he had thought to blame the pain on geography. Something in all that red clay in Pangea. But walk he did, through the night and most of the day. Without telling anyone where he was headed (for how do you tell someone where you’re going when you don’t know yourself?), he had merely set off toward the horizon.

There is some comfort in it, he thinks, in knowing that he can still carry himself across vast distances. It is easier, too, without having to stop for food or for water or to rest tired muscles. Because he feels neither hunger nor thirst and, though he has not slept in weeks, he certainly does not feel exhaustion.

His traveling takes him to the river. He could cross it, he thinks, test the limits of his new, undead body. Would he drown? Could he drown? Or would he merely be swept out to sea, where he would spend the rest of his days fighting the current, trying to reach shore? He feels a heaviness today and the ache in his ribcage prevents him from casting himself into the water. So, he merely turns and follows the river to the sea.

By the time he makes it there, the sun has sunk heavy and low toward the horizon. He gives pause there and longs to drag in a shuddering breath, just as he had every time he’d caught the sun suspended just above the earth in all the years he’d spent alive. But there is no breath, so he merely watches a moment before moving steadily onward.

But there is something that arrests his attention and he wonders, quite briefly, how he’d failed to notice her. His gaze falls heavy on her frame, the outstretched wings, and it occurs to him that he’d caught her on the verge of something. He blinks, takes one short step backward.

“Ah,” he says, subdued, “I’m sorry if I startled you.”

There is a spark of guilt at the center of him as she folds her wings against her sides again.
Don’t let me keep you, he wants to say but doesn’t.
Because he has learned that there isn’t a soul alive who needs his permission for anything.
And, without the warmth that had buoyed him through his youth, such a remark would likely fall flat. He has learned that, sometimes, it is better not to say anything at all.

So, he merely smiles (a drifting, wayward thing) in the wake of her reassurance. If he tries, he can convince himself that he only looks tired. That the lack of light in his eyes can be blamed on exhaustion and not something else entirely, something much darker. But he knows. Of course he knows that they know. Each and every one of them. They can tell it just by looking at him that he is not like them, not anymore. Because he had been arrogant enough to believe that he was somehow above death. (Though, really, it had not been arrogance at all but rather something desperate, something that did not care if he died). And death had made him pay for it.

He glances at the horizon. He had not expected to find anyone this far out either, though he admittedly had not given it much thought. He had passed hundreds of horses in the time it had taken him to arrive here and he had paid them no mind. But there is nowhere left for him to go now. He has reached the proverbial edge of the world and it is just the two of them here.

Her question is simple, certainly. There is one singular thing that set him in motion and, if he tried, he could probably determine exactly what it was. He has had his fair share of introspection as of late, however, and there is a thick beat of silence that follows before she offers her name.

“Oceane,” he echoes and then smiles that same placid smile because what a fitting name it is, “I’m Kensley.” Kensley, he says, because he has thought of nothing else to call himself despite the fact that the name does not fit him anymore. No, Kensley had been someone else entirely. “I suppose it just felt like a nice day for a walk,” he muses and drags his focus back to her face, thinks that it complements the splendor in the sky behind her. “I guess I lost track of time.” Still, he smiles because, though he lacks warmth, he is still good-natured.

“And you?” he asks then, tilting his head as he studies her.