I've made an art of
digging shallow holes
digging shallow holes
T
eiran has been standing outside the court for what feels like hours, leaned against a low wall, half in shadow, her face mostly concealed by the stark white of her hood. The guards at the door keep glancing at her, like they’re waiting for her to try and kill somebody. Like they’re waiting for her to make a break for the door. Like they’re waiting for her to break. She is already broken, they just cannot see it.She doesn’t recognize them, and it makes her realize how much things have changed. She wants to know what happened to Sera’s guard, the men she had passed several times a day on duty. They never would have looked at her as if she were something to distrust. If she took down her hood, they would see her collar, and maybe then they would look at her differently.
Probably then they would look at her with pity.
She has been waiting, and at every approach of steps her sage eyes glance up, but it’s never who she is waiting for. She doesn’t know how else to find him other than to wait here for him, certain he should have to arrive at some point. And then he does, deep and red against all the pale sandstone. He makes for the steps, and she follows him, swift and sharp. “Jahin.”
Teiran isn’t sure what to make of the way her voice sounds; filled with things she can’t quite put a name too. Not as flat and mechanical as it once was. She had thought coming back would have returned to her some sense of duty, but her patrols have all been filled by other soldiers, and it’s almost like she doesn’t recognize the capitol anymore. There is no Sera, no Bexley, no Eik. Even Matthias has disappeared. Everyone she knows has gone.
Perhaps, however, it’s herself that she doesn’t recognize.
She’s not sure why she’s here. Teiran looks up at the unicorn, whose bright amethyst eyes are so unlike anything else in the desert. To tell him that she came back? That is obvious. To tell him that she knows why he left? She might not have been Davke, but when you are quiet and small, others tend to forget you are around, even if they don’t like or even really accept you. She’d heard about Jahin’s interaction with Avdotya.
Some days the cracks in her are bigger, and some days she stops a fight in the markets and the soldier feels more like herself. But most of the time, Teiran isn’t sure what to do with herself. There is a world of things behind her green eyes, halls of mirrors reflecting versions of herself that she can’t quite remember. “I’ve been waiting for you,” it is the best she can do. Somewhere inside her is a thing saying I need something, but I don’t know what that something is.
@Jahin please excuse me while I get back into writing her <3
