Summer follows him.
Even when autumn breaks through and begins to cool the air, turning the leaves and breathing a chill across Beqanna, he does not turn from his perpetual summer. It grows as he does. The air is no longer just a slight difference from the norm when he steps forward, but instead entirely so. Summer crackles in the space around him—shifting all aspects of the weather until he is the center and the gravitational pull.
And he does not think anything of it.
Does not think it strange that the sky above him rumbles with the promise of monsoon. That the heat smothers the grass and the drying trees. Does not think anything but the fact that it feels like home as he stands on the edge of the river, the sky above him pregnant with rain that has not yet fallen.
He tips his head back to consider it. Pupiless eyes expanding and chest heaving as he wonders whether he should crack open the sky and let the storm unleash around him. Whether he should hold it back and live in the moments before—that unspoken promise somehow more tempting and exciting than anything else that he could bring. Flames lick up his legs before he dampens them, letting them curl away into nothing.
Until it is just him and the promise of a storm and the world around him.
Until there’s nothing but his own thoughts to follow him, his own dreams to crush his chest, his own hopes to flare dangerously to life within him. Until he’s nothing but that pending storm, pressing up against the barriers of his own mind and just waiting to unleash, waiting to become, waiting, waiting—
Forever waiting.
