EVENING CAME ON LIKE A BIG RED WING -
![[Image: apolonia_by_erasvita_dcmlqry_by_beccazw-dcnhnsj.png]](https://orig00.deviantart.net/4a1e/f/2018/265/e/7/apolonia_by_erasvita_dcmlqry_by_beccazw-dcnhnsj.png)
She is not quite sure why Eik’s question surprises her. She should know better than to expect that he, of all people, would take something so occult with anything less than a grain of salt. But she is still off-guard enough to blink as he asks it, and to answer, a moment later, with the whole, raw truth and not some half-gold lie - I’m not sure, she says, strangely serious, and frowns a little. Her eyebrows knit slightly. Something trembles a little in her chest, feral and uncertain.
But O, like anyone, wants to believe, and so she remedies it a moment later with a little smile and a jaunty kind of rebuttal. If she’s the real deal, I’m sure she could figure it out. I guess finding out is up to you.
Easy as ever she steps forward, bumps her lips against Eik’s cheek like a young girl might kiss her uncle. She does, more often than not, think of him as family,the same way she sees Seraphina as a long-lost relative on a dusty family tree. He is a fixture in her life as much as the dunes of Solterra and the omnipresence of the weapon at her hip and the searing pain of looking at something with that third eye, when she has to - a regularity she has grown up with and become, maybe, attached to.
I guess so, she says. Over Eik’s shoulder, the rest of Denocte unfolds like a well-weathered map, sprouting mountains and lakes, and huge forests strung with burning light, and soft-wailing music that digs its way, like a gnat, into every nook and cranny. What have you seen? O is not sure she’s seen anything like it before.
Then again, she hasn’t really seen much.
