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"Eik," Her voice rumbles like a panther and oh, that grin of hers could charm a snake. He's been fond of Apolonia from way back when she was adrift in her mother's sun-kissed belly. "She's special" he had said to Bexley the first time they met (she wouldn't remember that, would she?) and it's still true. He always felt proud that she was raised Solterran. It was maybe a foregone conclusion, her mother being Bexley Briar, but he always thought the girl could be lost to Night so, so easily. (He himself could be lost to Night, and that knowledge feels like a stone in his chest.)
"Who knows," he agrees, almost mournfully.
"I wouldn't ask anything. You can do that right? Get an answer for a question that was not asked? " He doesn't have words for all his questions anyway, at least he doesn't have the right ones. It seems to him that there is meaning lost whenever thoughts are forced into words. It doesn't seem to happen when Asterion speaks, or Seraphina, or maybe they just don't let it show. But most every time Eik opens his mouth, the words come out not-quite-right. Not horribly wrong, just... not perfect. It's just something he's gotten used to, otherwise he'd go insane.
Anyway, he figures that the answer would be not-quite right if the question was not-quite right. But of course, he isn't really sure how it all works. If he were with Isra he could believe in anything, but he's not and the tent reminds him of something he saw earlier in the evening. In the marketplace there was a tent selling "Solterran steel swords." This was not something of terrible interest to him, being a brawler of body and not weaponry, but the incredible prices drew him in. Upon closer inspection they were just some cheap knockoff smithwork (not even signed!) with beautifully worked wooden handles to fool the ignorant. The tent with its cards and its promises seems not so different than that smithy's tent-- which is, to say, a scam.
(He does not face the fact that the tent is the one place in all of Denocte that his magic cannot reach. This is something he'll ponder later, when the field is just an empty field again and it is too late to investigate.)
"Quite the party, huh." Maybe he's already run out of interesting things to say, or maybe he's just still scrambling to comprehend all the beauty and all the mystery at play tonight.
"A thousand dreams within me softly burn. From time to time
my heart is like some oak whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn."
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art by Pherigo
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Time makes fools of us all
