Weed has not desired to return to this land in so long.
He has wandered, far and free from the chains of this place, and he has discovered the kind of freedom and power and bloodshed that he had dreamt of. He returns a changed man, although one who is still so very much the same. He still longs for the kind of destruction that others flee from. He wakes with a hunger and a thirst that will never be quenched, a heart that shudders in delight at the idea of the end.
He had long since imagined this place bled dry of such curiosities—
and yet.
He finds himself back on its shores.
He remains there, for a moment. His shrewd eyes roaming Beqanna as he pulls the plants tighter. They crawl up his slender legs, drape over his shoulders. The vines prick and pierce his skin, but he has never noticed the love bites that they leave. His flesh has long since scarred and puckered beneath the touch.
It is not surprising that he sees her first.
That she is still here at all.
Perhaps, in the end, it is why he has come back at all. There is something like a shadow on the edges of his lips as he makes his way toward her, always so slow and deliberate in his movements, his thin body weaving amongst the others as though they do not exist at all. When he is close enough, he pauses, studying the way she looks the same and yet entirely different. How much has changed indeed.
“Straia,” her name jumps to his lips so quickly it’s as if he had said it yesterday.
“Did my gift to you burn with the rest of the Chamber when it fell?”
for so long have my teeth held my tongue from a venomous voice
but the poison has passed from my lips to my hands, an incendiary ploy
@[Straia]