two falling sparks - mast & family/any

[magnus]

you and I both know that the house is haunted
and you and I both know that the ghost is me

It has been two years since Magnus was washed up onto the shores of the beach, spitting saltwater from his lungs, and sometimes it feels like his death was yesterday. He can feel the fear, the way that it crawls up his veins and injects itself into his heart; he can remember the terror of watching Joelle fall to the wayside—watching Trashlip loom over him. The moment he realized that all of his worst fears about himself were coming true: that he actually could not protect those that he loved. That he had failed.

Even in this life, he carries that weight with him. It settles across his shoulders and sinks in his belly; it guides him in every choice that he makes. Perhaps that is why he has fallen back into his habit of walking along the borders of the kingdom; perhaps that is why he still cannot shake his insomnia—why he still struggles to sleep, grabbing an hour here and there. It does not take him long to see the grullo walking into the kingdom, and he watches him from afar for a few minutes, watches him walk around the areas that had received the worst of the burning—the areas that still had not yet fully recovered from the attack.

Nodding to himself, the buckskin made his way over toward him, giving him a shadow of a smile as his way of greeting before coming to a stop. “Hello there,” his voice honeyed whiskey. “I’m Magnus.” He liked that the Gates had, mostly, an open-door policy. He liked that they did not close their borders down to anyone who entered, but he still recognized the risks—still did his due diligence when he saw someone that he had never met before. “I don’t believe that we have met before. How can I help you?”

MAGNUS

once general. once lord. once king.