august
—« I was happy, the sun was high. I had enough. »
A
ugust is more free than he’s ever been in his life, and he’s beginning to feel it. Maybe that’s expected of a man who spent the better part of the winter with scabs turning to scars in a cellar. But it’s less of a physical thing (though the spring air is fresh and clean, sure, and it’s good to see the sun and sea again) than a mental weightlessness. He feels like a ship that’s traveled for years under a heavy load, and has finally left it at harbor.
There’s a lightness to his step, then, that’s been missing for a couple years as he walks among the rows and rows of flowers. August has never been to Terrastella before; it seemed a natural enough place to stop off on his way back from the Delumine festival. Giving his life to the Scarab as he had, he’d never really had the chance to travel, too tied to his work and his patrons. Now he planned to relish it.
He’s far from the only one in a fair mood today. The sky is a blameless blue, the air is thick with the sweet scent of blooms, and everywhere horses wander in pairs, in groups, and, more rare, alone like him. It’s another solo figure whose eye he catches as she passes by - a gaze as pretty-blue as the spring day, as golden as he is, with flowers wound in her mane.
“How do you think they got them planted so precisely?” he asks her, smiling amiably, as though he has not just forced on her the most unimaginative small-talk possible.
Unburdened he may be, but his conversational skills could use a brush-up.
