rhonen
molten eyes and a smile made for war
He hadn’t been sucked up in the Reckoning. Perhaps he had been missed, perhaps he chooses not to remember, or perhaps he had been away, looking for his family. He doesn’t know, he just knows that he returned to a Beqanna changed, and his powers missing, and swirling rumors and stories that he can’t sort out.
She smiles as she offers her name in return, eyes bright in her dark face. He doesn’t smile back, but he does relax into his stance across from her, the stiffness of his body fading. Rhonen is attentive to her words, but his expression darkens as he comprehends them, posture going rigid again. An irritated flick of his copper tail against his haunches, an uneasy shuffle of his feet as he considers.
“They overstep,” he finally says, voice gravelly and full of a dark fury that he tries hard to suppress. “Greed.” Disgust drips from the word, and he shakes his head, unaware that his ears are pinned against his skull, nearly disappearing into the strands of his mane. But it is clear the anger is not directed at her. “The fae did not give me my powers. My powers were a consequence of holding a dark force at bay keeping it away from harming anyone else; but now I cannot even tell if I hold that force prisoner inside of me anymore. If it is free, and it wreaks havoc, who then is greedy? They can deal with the consequences if it escapes before I can re-establish my control, before the other three who were in the same boat as I do, and I will watch the world burn.”
There’s a dissonance, there. Something that says despite his attitude about it, he wouldn’t let the world burn. He was willing to die for them the first time around, and chances are, he’d risk death again to protect Beqanna. But screw the fae, he thinks, for thinking they know the best. “Do they want to be worshipped like Gods? If so, they certainly aren’t kind ones.” He muses outloud, but then slowly focuses again on Jinju, warily, wondering if she will now show fear of him, of his darkness. It is what he claims to want, but really he doesn’t want them to be afraid of him.
“Have you found a home here in this new Beqanna, Jinju?” That, too, he has lost. His Falls, his family legacy; it’s gone.
