wrapped in red; magnus/any

[magnus]

She is beautiful and naive as the innocent often are and Magnus is drawn to protect her, to pull her beneath his proverbial wing and shield her from the world. He is glad that she had chosen to follow him home to Tephra and as they wander around the island together, the feeling only grows. The world after the reckoning was not always kind; it was dark and full of secrets no one had deciphered yet. It was not the kind of place for the innocent to wander around on their own. It wasn’t kind to the lost.

He doesn’t voice those concerns though or even elude to them. Instead he just continues to walk along her side, listening attentively when she discusses the things that she had lost. At the mention of the magic that had bled from her, he is at first delighted and then saddened for her. How terrible to have lost something so integral to who you are; how awful to have been able to control such beauty and to no longer.

“I am terribly sorry to hear that,” he says genuinely, although he quickly follows it up, “but I am sure that you were something to behold. I am certain you will be again soon.” He had heard whisperings along the wind of magic that had seeped back into Beqanna. For those regaining those bits and pieces of themselves he imagined that he felt like oxygen pooling back into their lungs. A thin veil being lifted so that they could once again see Beqanna for all that it was and could be again. Not that he would know for certain.

At her question, he shakes his head lightly. “Ah, no. I have had no such gifts.” For a time, he bore the weight of eagle wings, but they were gifts from Heaven; while he had eventually gotten used to them and even come to appreciate their power, they were always slightly awkward, always slightly wrong. He had not been particularly upset when he had woken up and found them stripped from him. They were never his in the first place. “I don’t mind though. It is the way that I have always been.”

out of the blue out into the loneliest place that you'll ever know
I carried the world just as far as I could but the damage had taken its toll