Kassandra did not know or understand this, but Furae’s destruction had not been her fault;
nor its preservation, her responsibility. Stolen from her true family as a babe, she had been forcibly woven into the fate of the doomed kingdom. But, her choice or no, it still weighed on her like a yoke of penance. Perhaps even more poignant was her total acceptance of the fact that she would not go back, even if she could go back. Furae’s demise haunted her, and had done so since her very first vision, nigh on her whole lifetime ago. Maybe, if she’d had any understanding of where her visions came from, she would be able to… accept them, instead of fighting against them. But every nightmare was a war within herself that left her mind tired and her body bruised and shaken; her eyes burned from rolling in their sockets and her head and neck ached from the uncontrollable thrashing.
Her hallucination-induced tremors and the strange settling of her persona following them could be off-putting to most; this stranger, with his ambient glow that reminded her of bioluminescence in the deep sea-- or the hottest blue of a very distant star-- didn’t seem entirely too rattled. It was a pleasant company to behold, and one she did not often get to experience. “I think I already have,” she murmured, a coolness settling into her bones as she thought of the spread of stars above her-- Denoctian air around her. “Though I may not know it. A home is like a pleasant dream; when you reach and long for it, it eludes you. It’s only when you have no expectations that you find it.”
The Folly Tower had been her home, once. The people of Furae had been her people, even if most of them did not know she existed. She’d watched them like a caged spectre, high above the goings on of their little lives, unable to interact with, to share in, or to speak of their experiences.
The stranger spoke of Tempus and Kassandra hummed a note, something caught between acceptance and denial. “To be honest, I don’t think Tempus had much to do with it. My misfortune.” Her head swung languidly around with the air of someone coming to some sort of tired acknowledgment of an unavoidable fate, gradual and unhurried. She fixed Azrael with silverite eyes, the bags underneath them heavy and blue. “I think it was mostly mortals, grasping at things they should not understand.”
There is good in this world. She thinks of tall antlers and two sets of purple-fuzzed ears; white rats, gold jewelry, the scent of earth and leather. “There is good in the world,” she agrees. “I think the world is inherently good. I don’t think it has a choice. Don’t you?”
He is good company and comfortable, though his words are sad despite the tone in which she speaks. He talks about his past as though it is truly in the past; how she wishes she could shake her own cobwebs so easily.
They sit together in silence for a while, watching the waves and the lights twinkling far across the sea, until Kassandra shakes the sand from her pelt a final time-- golden grains scattering to the earth like falling stars-- and nods her goodbyes. Together, she and her star-painted hound disappear into the dark, and gradually, the glow of Azrael's bio-luminescence fades behind them.
