I should have loved a thunderbird instead
at least when spring comes they roar back again
The ocean of his own making continues to swirl around them, as if driven by its own pulse. His own studies have given him plenty to work with—enough for him to color the aquatic world with his own creations. He hears the faint, strange noise of a whale in the distance. Sees the shadows of something much too large to be just a fish pass overhead, leaving its shadow on the dappled floor below.
It brings a faint smile to his lips as he considers it all.
No matter how long he has spent living in this world, he never grows tired of it.
But his illusions are not the only thing to hold his attention these days. He turns his amethyst gaze away from the ocean around him and back toward the man of red and orange—carved of sunsets. He considers it and then nods, finding the answer both appealing and understandable. “I would help you find him, but I know very few residents of Tephra,” he says with an elegant shrug. “I have only recently moved here.”
Somewhere, he knows, his own children are exploring and finding their own place within the volcanic land, and he turns his gaze away for a moment—glancing to the horizon momentarily. He is not an absentee father, but he believes in the gift of space. They are both smart children. They do not need him.
“What I do everywhere, I suppose,” he says with a dreamy curl of lip as his eyes focus on Elio once more. “Carving my dreams into reality.” A fish, brilliantly colored, swims around him, swooping under his belly and then leaping and disappearing into nothing. Aegean considers it with his calm gaze.
“What do you dream of?”
The question comes from no where and Aegean does not yet look back to him.
Instead watches the fish swim around them, lets the words settle into the air between them.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
(I think I made you up inside my head.)