He has not slept.

It is not an entirely strange thing, this lack of sleep -- he spends many nights pacing the streets full of festivity, trying to escape the nightmares that threaten with every wave of exhaustion, the scene that replays every time he closes his eyes. 

Snow, stained crimson with a pool of blood atop Dead Horse Ridge. Winifred, sprawled like a doll across the ground, her throat a gaping hole. Desdemona, kneeling by her sister with blood splatter across her chest, frantically muttering a dark spell. Pentecoast, staring at him with an accusation in his pale eyes, his teeth still holding flesh between them.

Look what you’ve done, the wind howls at him, look at what you’ve done.

He wakes up screaming every time, his throat rasped hoarse, until he has taken to just avoiding sleep until he drops from exhaustion. He already hurts, so often -- his joints aching from the strain of supporting his body at such a young age, forced to grow at an accelerated rate in his home land, and the chill of the winter air hasn’t been helping. He feels like a puppet with broken strings, like a machine with rusted pieces -- he thinks, maybe, that he is not entirely a person, with the malevolence that rests inside his chest.

It hangs there, heavy and choking, a constant weight to remind him of what he has done, what he cannot outrun. He cannot control it, try as he might, and he lives in constant fear of the possibility that his magic might break through at any moment.

He catches sight of a familiar face, of antlers with bright jewels hanging from them, and he breathes out a sigh of relief -- Septimus is, at least, someone he recognizes, and he has not yet forgotten how the older man had reassured him at the disaster when his fears had overcome his senses. “Septimus,” He murmurs as he winds his way closer, through the market stalls, and he stops a few feet away from the man with his tail hanging low enough to sweep along the dusty path. 

“What have you got there?”

"Speaking."

He has long-since given up on the idea of sleep as something that was necessary for survival; after all, he spent so little time sleeping that it seemed as though the need was simply a cruel joke of some sort. Seeing a friendly face at least gives the appearance of lifting away some of his exhaustion, however, no matter how the boy might try to hide it -- his ears perk forward, just slightly, and the curve of his mouth traces out the hint of a smile, just enough to keep from showing the sharp teeth that his lips hide.

He peers at the sketchbook, at first politely and then with more interest, his amber gaze moving across the elegant ink swirls and lines. “This is amazing, Septimus. I didn’t know you could draw so well.” Even the antlered man’s handwriting is pretty, looping across the page in a dark scrawl, and when he gets the chance he does his best to pick out the words that he’s familiar with, although his attention is quickly caught by the man’s question.

“I was not, no,” His tail moves from side to side, a slowly serpentine in its motion as he holds it low against the ground. It is, perhaps, the key to his strange moods, when his face only ever seemed to carry that exhausted air that overshadowed everything else. He considers the ink dragon for a few long moments, considers exactly how much he can reveal without exposing his own raw nerves, and then bites down the temptation to blurt out every nightmare he’s ever had.

He’s used to it -- Septimus makes him feel strangely safe, as though the scholarly man wouldn’t judge him for his crime, as though he wouldn’t be shown a cold shoulder once he confessed, or worse, as though his crimes wouldn’t be exposed so that everyone would know them. It was better to swallow down that strange impulse, to lock the words inside his ribcage and hold them there where they couldn’t break free, couldn’t condemn him before he found the key to controlling his magic.

“I’ve never actually met a God. Not here, nor the place I was born.” Not that he can remember, that is. His wild, cursed magic was apparently supposed to be a gift from a god, from Shishira himself when he had only been a newborn child, but whether Shishira himself had actually appeared to bestow the magic; well, he certainly couldn’t remember, and the tavern owner had been strangely tight-lipped about whatever had happened. “I don’t think I’d want to, honestly. They never seem to be up to any good.”

That might be an understatement, actually.

"Speaking."

Perhaps if Septimus had reached out, the boy might have found some comfort in it - -how long had it been since someone had touched him in a comforting way, in the way a friend might? The last contact he’d had was when Vik had tattooed the scarab onto his chest, and that, well -- that hadn’t exactly been friendly, so to speak. The older horse had been downright hostile, truthfully, and he’s somewhat afraid to even approach him again for fear of upsetting him once more.

At least Septimus didn’t seem to mind his company, although he was never entirely sure what exactly the antlered man was thinking -- he seemed comfortable, at least, and he had asked a question, so clearly he must want the conversation to continue…. Oh. It had been that question. It was, at least, marginally better than the question about his magic, he supposed.

“...a place called Caeleste, far from here.” He answers, the tip of his tail twitching once more -- back and forth it jerks, agitated by the mere mention of his homeland, and he cannot help the way that when he says Caeleste, what he hears is Winnifred, what he hears is that he can never go back until he manages to gain control of the curse that he was given. “They had Gods, as well -- but they were aligned to the seasons, not to Time itself, and each of them had specific types of magic that they would hand out to those they deemed worthy.”

He still doesn’t understand why Shishira -- cruel Shishira, god of late winter, god of chaos -- had chosen him to bless. Why had the god picked out one newborn child to give this curse to, to forever throw his life into a spiral, to forever mean that his life would not be his own until he learned to control it?

It was, certainly, a cruel trick.

“Are you from here?”

"Speaking."