He can feel her before he sees her, pushing into his space.
There’s a shift in the air, a tightening of his muscles, and the silver woman is before him. He doesn’t say anything at first but watches her with impassive eyes. She expects something, he thinks, someone to lean on, someone to cry with or build with or break with. She is like the rest of them, then. They all scramble like ants displaced from under a rock, lost and helpless in this exposed new world. He cannot help her, though, because he is not yet whole himself. It would be like trying to make a seamless line out of jagged pieces, him taking in her problems and making them his own. They are all imperfect. If anything, Beqanna has shown them as much by tearing down their homes and stripping them of their accoutrements. The lesson wasn’t necessary for Walter; he’s never needed a reminder of his otherness.
In some strange way, he’s almost glad for the reckoning that has shaken their world to its core. When the Chamber had inverted and sucked up its pines, ravens, and rocks like the ravenous beast it was, he had been spit out a new man. Maybe not fundamentally (not in the creases of his brain or the chambers of his forever-beating heart, not in the paradoxical way he craves connection but flinches at touch) but he had evolved. It was as if a new skin had tightened across him when he shed his wings, a new face that could deflect even the most earnest of advances.
Perhaps like the one that comes to him now, glazed silver and round edges. He wonders what horrors she’s seen, what wonders. What have the gods deemed her fit to see in the chaos that has consumed them all? There’s an ugly gouge long since healed on her hip that catches his eye immediately. There are so many explanations for it that he doesn’t pause to question it. His heart beats faster but he doesn’t know why; she keeps her distance and it should soothe him. It doesn’t.
He can’t give her anything, but he doesn’t tell her that. Walter doesn’t tell her that she is simultaneously dangerous and beautiful, like a storm gathering. Dangerous, because she is still so close to him, even with the space she puts between them (dangerous, because his skin prickles with the need to get away by whatever means necessary). Beautiful, too, because even with the magic drained like marrow from their bones, she seems to shine angelic in the apocalyptic light (beautiful, because she is parts of Djinni with her gold and closeness; he can almost smell the pine sap).
“Aren’t we all,” he says, suppressing a shudder. But he’s gotten better, he tells himself, grits his teeth. The palomino takes one step towards her. He’s not sure if the next step will be to stay or to flee, so he lets the earth make anchors of his feet before he can decide either way. His smile is awkward and late, but it comes next. “Some places never change, at least.” She doesn’t have that lost look, he concludes, she doesn’t look like the universe has birthed black holes all around her. “You lived here, didn’t you? In the meadow? Soot and soil doesn’t cover her; clouds don’t pass in front of her eyes. He tests her. “You haven’t lost much, then.” It isn’t a question. He wonders if she’ll answer, anyway.
Walter
come down from the mountain
you have been gone too long