09-10-2020, 12:48 PM
He can feel it. A tear in the fabric of the cosmos. As with so many things, he’s not quite sure why or how. He knows only that it is there, and that it should not be.
It has been ages since he had ventured back to his home. That his hunt for the rip had led him back here is both unsurprising and unsettling. He has learned so much in the time he has been away. Enough that when he returns, he slips quietly through the ripples of time and space onto the beach rather than bursting through spectacularly as he once might have done. Practice had tempered the brute force he’d once applied to make his abilities work into a much finer, more delicate instrument. And there is a pride in being able to slip so easily and quietly between worlds.
With nothing to herald his arrival, he finds himself standing silently on the bone-strewn beach, pale sands and ebony waves washed in the soft glow of moonlight. Overhead the stars twinkle with brilliant innocence, the truth of their mass and depth so easily cloaked by the immense space that separates them from this impossibly small world.
He is just in time to see the girl pluck the bones of a child from their resting place in the sand, wrapping them gently in a shimmering shell of starlight. He can feel the tug of her ability, the familiar symphony of the stars dancing along each delicate thread as she weaves them around the long-dead foal.
He says nothing as he watches her place a heartbroken kiss to the specter’s brow before sending it to gambol among the stars. The scene feels private, as though she needed the solitary send-off for a life cut short far too soon. But it is a sentiment Ten can deeply understand. A sentiment he had once sacrificed his own life for.
It’s curious to think that, were it not for a quirk of fate (or mercy, or whatever one wished to call it), his own bones might still be curled alongside the very heart of Beqanna.
But then she turns to peer in the direction of the breach, and Ten is recalled to his purpose here. He had not intended to make this a social visit, but his curiosity has been piqued. So after another moment of silence, with his gaze focused on Shipka rather than the horizon she now watches, he asks quietly, “What do you make of it?”
It has been ages since he had ventured back to his home. That his hunt for the rip had led him back here is both unsurprising and unsettling. He has learned so much in the time he has been away. Enough that when he returns, he slips quietly through the ripples of time and space onto the beach rather than bursting through spectacularly as he once might have done. Practice had tempered the brute force he’d once applied to make his abilities work into a much finer, more delicate instrument. And there is a pride in being able to slip so easily and quietly between worlds.
With nothing to herald his arrival, he finds himself standing silently on the bone-strewn beach, pale sands and ebony waves washed in the soft glow of moonlight. Overhead the stars twinkle with brilliant innocence, the truth of their mass and depth so easily cloaked by the immense space that separates them from this impossibly small world.
He is just in time to see the girl pluck the bones of a child from their resting place in the sand, wrapping them gently in a shimmering shell of starlight. He can feel the tug of her ability, the familiar symphony of the stars dancing along each delicate thread as she weaves them around the long-dead foal.
He says nothing as he watches her place a heartbroken kiss to the specter’s brow before sending it to gambol among the stars. The scene feels private, as though she needed the solitary send-off for a life cut short far too soon. But it is a sentiment Ten can deeply understand. A sentiment he had once sacrificed his own life for.
It’s curious to think that, were it not for a quirk of fate (or mercy, or whatever one wished to call it), his own bones might still be curled alongside the very heart of Beqanna.
But then she turns to peer in the direction of the breach, and Ten is recalled to his purpose here. He had not intended to make this a social visit, but his curiosity has been piqued. So after another moment of silence, with his gaze focused on Shipka rather than the horizon she now watches, he asks quietly, “What do you make of it?”
TEN
