[open] way down we go --

[Caster]

For all his worry, his chest remains full of hope, the possibility of someone, or something to keep close - to etch its familiarity along his soul. A thing of memory, much like the tattered remains of what he still clings to.

“Still,” he notes, gaze drifting along after her admission, watching the fog float carefully along her legs, “I wouldn’t discount it for a lack of power.” He adjusts his stance, nearing her bearings only to watch the mist match his movement; it seemed more interested in mooring against her limbs than his own unfamiliar set.

Coiling ever graceful against the form of its home.

”It chooses you regardless,” he murmurs, blinking slowly. The ghost of a warm smile toys at growing along his jaw, yet he breathes it in, swallowing his joy before it could spin away from him. Lost, lost as all things.

He finds that he likes these moments of calm, of quiet before questions trickle forth to splinter the silence, watching the fog gather at the base of the treeline while he waits.

Waits.

“Away,” he finally relents, choosing his words carefully, not because he feared her judgement, but because he dreaded reliving his own. His legs could take him far, as far as he could stomach their ache, but there was no escape for the truth once it was told. Cas couldn’t even remember how often he had looked back, if even at all. Panic driven to flee, to run, anywhere. Anywhere but here.

“I ran until I could no longer smell their fear, could no longer hear the terror in their voices.” He ran until his legs threatened to give, until his chest hurt from seeking air in great, straining breaths, until his eyes clouded from the exertion.

Until there was nothing left but the growing dark as his sight swam in endless twilight.

No.

“No?”  The word tasted like regret on his tongue.

“You’re not—no reason.” He stares, long and full with eyes glinting painfully wet along their sapphire lens. If he had meant to cry, he starved himself of it “everyone is someone else's reason.”

He needed to believe that people left lasting impressions on one another, even when memory failed.

caster

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[eleria]

eleria

What a thing it is, she thinks, to be chosen. Chosen by the fog. She thinks briefly of her father, who’d been made of horse-flesh, once. Or, at least, that’s what he’d told her. Until he’d become a storm, until the fog had clung to him so desperately that it had become him. Or he had become it. And how tortured he has been by it, she thinks, while she studies the fog that slides its cool fingers down her cannon bone now. She almost tells him that it had not chosen her, not really. Her father had given it to her. But she doesn’t. Only quirks a slanted smirk and nods, allows him to think that she is a chosen thing and that being chosen is its own kind of power.

He is quiet then and she studies his face while he remembers. She has heard stories of the creatures the darkness brought, their teeth, how they’d ravaged. How bodies could be there one moment and absolutely, irrevocably gone the next. How terrible it must have been, she thinks, that he should still be haunted by it now. It has been years since the light returned to Beqanna. But he is not the only one, she knows, who has found the darkness and its terrors impossible to forget.

“It’s what she wanted for you,” she says, “she would be happy to know that you survived.” This, too, stated as a matter of fact. She is not a sentimental creature, Eleria, but she believes there’s some truth to this. If his mother had told him to run, she’d wanted him to run for his life and certainly she’d take some satisfaction in knowing he’d made it through the darkness unharmed.

And when he speaks again it occurs to her that he has misunderstood her. There had been no sadness in her admitting it. She smiles then but there is no warmth in it. It’s a distant thing, heavy, contemplative. “You’re a romantic, then,” she observes and then, after a beat, she says, “it was my brother who brought the darkness to Beqanna.” She tilts her head, the smile fading. “Believe me when I say that no one in my family is anyone’s reason for anything good.”

oh, my head’s in the clouds
But i don’t feel close to the sun

[Caster]

The moor began to settle in, mists hanging low and heavy, thick where he stepped, but less surreal as the sky thinned out towards his barrel. The air remained steely gray, but he could see a bit further now than before—a group of thrush took flight, climbing high and away. He watched them in silence, allowing his eyes to follow their path skyward until they disappeared from sight.

And though he wanted to believe in good things, or the possibility of them. He was met with a wrench in the plan of his hopeful nature.

Was it what his mother had wanted for him, or had she just been too frightened to think otherwise?

“I may never know for sure,” he admitted, pushing the words out through a sieve; he held back every knot that may betray him. He swallowed the congealed remains of his grief until only words bled through. He looked at her then, steadily turning his eyes away from the far off places they ran to every time he must face his reality of not remembering. Of not knowing. Cas looked at her as if to say thank you, and somehow stumbled against the grains of its texture against his tongue.

It was not that he was ungrateful. Thanking her made it more real, thanking her felt like giving up.

He’d never been called a romantic, though he humored her words with a faint smile. This one finding his lips where his appreciation couldn’t.

It was my brother...All at once the light left his stare, sending his cobalt gaze into something flat, something hollow, something dead. Words evaporate, they leave themselves along the mists, and his quiet turns into the sound of breaths. Long unsteady inhales, as he thought of what to say, of what to do now. He had run that day, but he didn’t run now.

Cas stood there, stone solid, gritting his teeth, ears falling back in angles—his discomfort became a part of the landscape. Drifting down and down, his body that was tense became loose as he submit to the sorrow her revelation brought to their meeting.

And yet, she was not her brother. Whatever was done in his name, didn’t make her responsible, though she remained another unknown thing to him—another uncertainty among so many.

“What’s your name?” he choked out. If he must break today, if he must shatter. He would like to know the name of his undoing.

caster

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