If am lost, I am lost on purpose.
Alaska cannot remember the last time that she allowed herself the company of those like her.
She had always stuck to herself. Not because she was shy (the concept was foreign to her) but because she was so deeply uninterested in the lives of those around her. They all engaged in politics and scandal and the kind of drama that she found so trivial—so deeply boring. Alaska could not imagine turning her head from the wilderness and the skies to the desert of their lives; couldn’t imagine trading freedom for that.
But he is different enough to ensnare her attention.
Different enough that she finds herself pausing, sinking into the moment with him.
“There is so much to discover,” she says with an earnest smile, her lips turning up into a nearly dreamy curve. “Especially if you are new.” Her gaze goes slightly hazy as she looks past him to the horizon. “The islands of the north are nearly entirely covered with ice, save for the parts where fire has touched them, and the jungles of the west are so dense that you could lose yourself for days in the volcano’s shadow.”
Perhaps she should not be exploring such places, but it does not occur to her.
Borders and kingdoms are meaningless in the end.
Her gaze snaps back to him. “Fitting in is overrated. Why bother trying?” She angles her head, trying to imagine what it would be like to try and force herself to fit into the places where she clearly did not.
There would perhaps be bitterness in her answer, if she was capable of it, when she thinks of her childhood, but she feels nothing at all. “I was. I wandered away and lost my mother at a young age.” She still remembers what it had been like when first learning to shift—how she had taken to the skies and never found her way back. “I was taken in by a man named Wolfbane but I wandered from him too.”
A pause and a rolling of her shoulders.
“It has just been me on my own ever since.”
@[Mesec]