and underneath the layers, I find myself asking what's left
a hollowed out form, the skeleton of a ghost, the pitiful echo of what once was
She is just as proud as him, standing defiantly against his word. There is only so much he can do, so much he can say, that will make sense of the dream (reality?) in which he participated.
In that Desert, he saved her. Is that why she is here today? Did he resuscitate the memory of her and bring her through the portal, or was it pre-conceived and it would have happened either way?
(Stop with the what-ifs. Just stop)
A deep, calculating breath races past his lips as an otherwise silent moment captures him. She refuses to believe him or to accept the scenario he offered her, as though he is a worn storyteller making his rounds. The reactions radiating from her are not of incredulous awe, but in fact weighted denial and skepticism. There’s a sharp edge to her question; all it needs is a lift of her chin and a dismissive scoff. For a long moment, Castile waits for that. A few heartbeats pass and he expects her to turn and abandon him in the murky shadows of the forest, but to his surprise, she remains here with him. ”Because I thought you could give me more answers,” there are reasons that the cloaked murderer sought her out so adamantly and destroyed her so mercilessly. A killer hardly reveals such locked intricacies. The victims though… they have insight.
Yet here I am, she bluntly quips, uncrushed. The muscles in his jaws clench similarly to hers, but then he pulls his eyes from her and looks around them. Birds sing high above, punctuated by the occasional caw of a raven. There are foxes shuffling through the leafbeds in the distance. These are sounds he has listened to his entire life. This Beqanna is what he was raised in. There are no deserts, especially nothing quite so vast as where he first saw Craft.
When he looks again at her, amusement twinkles in his mismatched eyes. ”Tell me then, where exactly you are,” he gropes for something, anything, to unbalance her confidence, ”and how we can go back to the Desert.”
castile