It did not take him very long in Solterra to learn that words can wound as well as weapons. This is one thing Eik never imagined before Novus- that you could wage a war with your tongue just as easily as with a blade. Easier, even. So despite Jaxis' youth he does not discredit the danger she might posses. It seems most everyone here is a fighter, in some way or another. Part of his respectful caution might also be that she is already near his height and growing-- and he knows of her father, if only in passing, and the venerable talent and sheer heft of the man.
Eik, for all his scars, is at once a tired and restless man. He feels as though there's no fight in him anymore, and he misses that spark. He isn't really sure who he is without it. In Jaxis he sees infinite possibilities. He almost remembers what it was like to be a child with the future looming before you with all its uncertainty and all its promise.
" Enjoying the coolness of the breeze. I assume I'm not the only one?"
Oh, he will never not enjoy a cool breeze here. Eik is marked by the desert now but some part of him will always be man of snow and tundra, infinite blue-grey-white. "Always." It has been so shockingly different here that he has a hard time even remembering what it felt like to be so cold your bones hurt. Looking at the impossibly young woman before him, it makes him wonder with amusement: "Do you know what it is to be cold?" He tries not to look or sound mocking nor smug, but a sly half-smile curls at the edge of his lips. And then, curiosity driving the conversation on (also the knowing that the more he asks, the less he must answer), he asks another question, barely leaving the poor girl enough time to answer the first. "What does a kid do around here, anyway?" Learning to read and write, he would assume, what else after that is beyond him.
- - -
There is no better way to know us
E I K
than as two wolves, come separately to a wood
@
Jaxis <3
Time makes fools of us all
