02-24-2022, 09:46 PM
Amet
He has spent a lifetime away from Beqanna.
The continent he'd made his home as a boy, not much older than a yearling, is a distant memory. Hyaline, its lake, the heady scent of wisteria... Ciri. Jah-Lilah. Takhar. Masuda. Bayek. Memories of them feel like a fever dream. Tangerine, Castile, Eione, Makhai - those memories, even more surreal.
Even Iset and Sakir, his own siblings, rarely cross his mind. When had he seen them last? Just after Hyaline had been razed with flame?
Could he even recognize them anymore? Was any of it real?
He returns, much the same and yet perhaps not. His golden scales still glimmer in the autumn sun, his mahogany eyes still sharp. Upon his shoulders rest draconic wings he does not quite remember carrying the last time he'd walked Beqanna, but the weight of them is comfortable enough. They fold to his sides and the leather of them is softer than expected as they brush his plated barrel.
He stands in the very center of what he had always known to be the Meadow, but something feels very different. It's not in the scenery - the grasses still seem endless, the sky still a dazzling blue. It's early in the season and the warmth of summer has carried into the beginnings of autumn but there is stll that scent of fall that lingers in the crispness of the air.
If not in the scenery, it must be the air. There's a saltiness in it that wasn't there before, as if the sea is closer than what he is used to. It reminds him of Tephra, Nerine, those places along the coast that are weather-worn and sea-swept.
It's the horses, too, who pass by. All of them unfamiliar. He searches their faces, simultaneously hoping and dreading that someone he recognizes will happen to meander through. But he had been gone for so long, had spent a lifetime away.
He'd done it before - he could recreate himself again.
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
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