Long ago, on a very different day, Atlas had stumbled off the deck of the Vis Vitalis, bid goodbye to his new friend, Captain Thunderclash, and became a longterm resident of a Terrastellan boarding house. He had crossed the Terminus Sea, through storm and strife, feeling at the end of his long journey. After all, he had traversed and survived the terrible Sadugal desert, survived all the challenges thrown his way, and arrived in a new land, scarred, humbled, and dragging his fair share of skeletons. He had found meager work as a scribe, copying lists, recording inventories, and acting as a stenographer for poets and actors of the spoken word.

For a long time, he’d hunched in his little boarding house, trying to convince himself he was content. But Atlas was a nomad at heart-- a harried wanderer, doomed to forever walk the land, and when he departed Terrastella, he left feeling that, while he certainly had a place to return to, it was not quite home. It was a thread, a theme, that would continue to play out in his journeys across Novus: he had places he felt comfortable revisiting, but nowhere he was truly connected, nowhere that would jump from his lips at the question “So, where are you from?”

He thinks that now as he looks out over the same sea which had brought him to Novus so very long ago. The gulls are loud in the summer night, and the stars are bright in a cloudless sky. He can name them all, now-- little Aladhfar, the golden centre of the Lyre; Amansizaya, the knot in the wooden canoe of the fisher-horse; bright red Diadem, the crown jewel of Vespera’s Tiara. He knows the stars, now, and he knows this sea; these cliffs; this castle. But is this his home?

Deep at the center of it all there is a question, and it is one of fear. Why is he so hesitant to settle? What terrifies him so about putting down roots, about returning home? On the surface, he argues it is because there is so much to discover. But in reality, the crux of the issue (there are nine stars in Crux, it rises in winter, and intersects the Tiara on an angle) is he is scared that, one day, like all his other days, there will be no home to return to; the people he knows and loves will be dead, or look at him as though he is a stranger; and though it is unlikely that Terrastella will suddenly crumble to the ground, surely Zukai also still stands, it’s halls full of ghosts?

He had a wife, once, and though he could not love her in that way, she was a friend; he’d a son (nephew), and brothers, and people whose company he enjoyed. He’d had Nashira. And when she’d cut the golden hair from his neck and bid him flee with his life everything had been severed by that one, single, swing of the blade. It was that easy.

He is on the ramparts, staring out at the sky through an embrasure in the castle wall, as the Terminus continues its quest to swallow the castle from below. The air is heavy with heat and salt. Terrastella’s singular tower looms behind him, a tall, black shadow, as poignant and stoic as the questions now raging within his mind.