i’ve been training like a soldier; i’ve been burning through this sorrow
As she glides closer, he takes a step back, centering his weight and stilling his pulse. He feels his senses sharpen as they have for so many centuries and he angles his head in her direction, a watery ear tipping toward her. That strange, throaty clicking noise sounds again and he tracks her progress until she lands close enough to engage but far enough away to keep him standing in the defense versus charging.
“This land is old,” he affirms, because he knows in his bones where they are. He knows even when dread sluices though him and his blood runs cold with memory. “Older than you could ever imagine.” It is not patronizing, although it is hard to tell with how unyielding his voice is, and he doesn’t bother to soften it further to avoid bruising her ego on the edges of it. Nyktos does not know how to be different than what he is. He doesn’t know how to be anything but this soldier standing in front of her.
But she hasn’t answered his question yet—not the real one—and so he presses on. He will have to answer to the Queen and the General when he returns and he can’t return empty-handed. Not when he had come here first instead of gathering to them and awaiting orders. (For all of his obedience, he never had wrung out that final thread of rebellion from his bones.) “I mean the land around it though,” he clarifies, trying to smooth the conversation enough to gather information. “What this land is now couched in.”
She asks him a question in return and though he is loath to give up personal details, he knows that an eye for an eye is what is just so he looks at her without seeing. “I am a solder of the Baltian kingdom.”
nyktos
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