Dusk is falling over the Riverlands, the green haze turning grey. Solace cuts through the late summer underbrush, phasing away now and again where the tangle of ivy and briers have woven together to form something solid. Every day she gains a little more control over her chaotic magic, but the process is far slower than she would like.
Spectral and twinged with light, Solace travel silently, always looking for any sign that her hide-out has been discovered - a scrape of hair against a tree, a hoof-print in the mud, a lingering scent on the air - but it seems that another day has passed in quiet safety.
Clegane is sleeping when she finds him but is quick to stir at the sound of her approach as she had become tangible again. She nickers happily to him, just loud enough to reach across the diminishing space between them, unflinching at the sight of his disfigured face.
She didn't know who hurt this boy, who murdered her daughter. She didn't know if they were still looking for the colt - if their business with Warlight was finished. The attack could have been random, but until Clegane is fully healed, and Solace's mind and body have recovered from their own ordeal, she couldn't risk running into Warlight's attacker. After a year under ice - literally - Solace was still putting herself back together. Slowly. The death of her daughter set her back, but Clegane had been there to keep the darkness from setting in. She hadn't had another choice. But there was once piece, in particular, she found it hard to get along without.
But she won't think of that now. Not with her little boy smiling his haphazard smile up at her.
Together again they walk for a time, following the scent of salt in the air as he tells her of his day. She nods as he speaks in excited tones and replies when he looks to her for an exclamation, but a more astute companion would have noticed that her mind was elsewhere.
It isn't long before they run out of land, arriving at the coast just in time to see the sun dip below the distant Pampas.
"It's time for bed," Solace finally says, breaking the silence which had fallen over them as they tracked the sun's fall.
"I want to visit there someday" Clegane counters, hoping to bait his guardian into a few more moments of conversation.
"Brilliant Pampas?" She concedes, nudging him back towards the safety of the underbrush.
"There, and everywhere..."
Solace only smiles at this as she sinks to the earth with a sigh, and he knows that it truly is time to sleep.
Dusk's grey has deepened into murky darkness and the magic-fed frost which they both wore had spread to cover their resting forms. But from between the lacework of ice-crystals, Solace's eyes look heavenward, and sleep does not find her until fragments of moonlight can be seen peeking through the canopy.
Finally, she slips away under the tide of sleep, but tonight is not like the endless chain of nights before it. Tonight sleep is not dark and silent; tonight there is someone there.
Kagerus.
we are the ever-living ghost of what once was
@[Kagerus]
