The afternoon is fading to a nippy twilight. Winter is here, and all the warmth in the land seems to flee as soon as the sun dips beneath the sky. It makes the night seem somehow darker, as though it were dark enough to suck the heat from the earth-- yet from that void the stars persist, defiant. One by one they begin to show themselves, as the sun's lingering light loosens from the horizon, finger by finger, and night begins to take the stage.

Night is when his thoughts fly away, up into the sky with the heat of the desert. Sometimes he sleeps, but mostly he just wanders the melancholy halls of his mind. On this evening he also begins to walk the outskirts of the court, venturing partway into the outlying lands- Mors, Elatus, Vitae- in a large, looping circle.

It might appear like he is patrolling, but he's not really.

(You don't really do anything, do you? because then you'd have to choose one side of the fence or another. Let me tell them more of all the things you half-do... would it add up to more than one man? Or, upon closer inspection, does it all crumble to dust... All these thousands of words and thoughts-- dust.)

He walks, alone with his thoughts and the slowly fading twilight, step by step through sand and stone and sand again, swaying his head to some slow cosmic rhythm.

-     -     -
There is no better way to know us
E I K
than as two wolves, come separately to a wood