Magnus story was not that of an arrow’s path, taut and straight, pulled back and then shot forward. It was twisted and broken, often shooting out in multiple paths and then doubling back. It had jagged edges and poisonous curls, enticing and breaking and dragging him to his knees. The last time that he had seen Hybris, it had been during what he now thought of as the first chapter of his life: the seemingly most straightforward. Before he had been killed, before the world went dark, when everything made sense.
When he had returned to Beqanna, crawling from his saltwater grave and spitting up decades of ocean brine onto the beaches, she had not been there—but he had not been surprised. Almost no one from his prior life had still clung to the land. They had been shuffled and replaced with new faces, new problems, new everything. It had been jarring to acclimate himself to a land that was at once intensely familiar and yet completely alien—to learn some things again as if he was a babe and remember others as a veteran.
So, to see her there, standing amongst the crowds as if she had never left was deeply unsettling. He blinked several times, shaking his head as if she was a vision that would simply fade like morning fog. When she didn’t, he took a few steps forward and then paused again, swallowing hard. Finally, he gathered himself and moved forward, handsome face transparent in his confusion and disbelief. “Excuse me,” he said, voice hoarse and thick, “but you look like someone that I knew a very long time ago.”
His voice drifted off and he laughed, the sound a little strangled in his throat.
“But that’s not possible. You couldn’t be her.”
Still, he wondered.
magnus
@[Shan]
![[Image: gqYjsHr.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/KjqNDKxc/gqYjsHr.png)