The walls, cool in summer and warm in winter, still feel unnatural and claustrophobic to him. Raised by leagues of scrubby tundra beneath the vast grey sky, he cannot feel truly comfortable without the horizon in sight.
Still, he is no stranger to the court- he once walked these walls for days in a row. Some small but persistent, downright nagging voice in his head had told him there was some pattern to it all, and if he could understand the pattern-- if only he could understand the pattern, he would receive the message the builders left in the stone, the letters in each cut and placement of stone.
We get fantastical ideas, sometimes. They always take us places, in one way or another.
(-- remember the peregrine falcon flying alongside you, and the cracks in the earth that chased it, and the moon creeping silver-orange above the smoke-filled horizon.)
Eik, predictably, never found the mystical message in the stone, and his aversion to the structure grew- until the night he was lured to the library by midnight flames. Daily now he returns from the wilds and climbs the curved steps that elevate the courtyard from the rolling sands. Then down the open-air hallway and to the right, to a table with a book and a scroll and a small, well-worn pot of dark blue ink. And in the evenings he returns to here or there or wherever it was he came from, leaving the castle always with that slow but purposeful stride, lost in thought.
And so the story goes, but on this afternoon he's drawn from his thoughts by the sight of someone stopped to look at a picture on the wall. His attention rests on the youth for a moment but quickly slides over him to the tapestry that holds his attention so raptly. Solis is the first thing he sees; in fact it is one of the first words he learned to read, most likely from sheer exposure- the word is scattered across the court in scrolls and tapestries, even carved in the stone.
He looks at the body of the tapestry, and thinks briefly how impossible it is to depict a god, for who knows what they truly look like? He reckons you wouldn't know a god from a simpleton if they were standing right in front of you. For all he knows, he's Solis and doesn't know it, he and his ten thousand thoughts, spinning the sun round like a good boy now. A small smile plays at the edge of his lips.
"I don't think they got his chin right..." He murmurs, soft enough that the youth beside him could easily be deep enough in thought to not hear him at all.
