The last time Eik moved like this, the world was on fire and he was running for his life.
The world never stopped burning, not for those with eyes to see it, but eventually he stopped running. You learn to live with fire, with the scent (that ash and smoke and cooked-meat smell) and the sound (the sound! like an unholy beast thrashing with an ancient, endless hunger, swallowing the screams) and most noticeably the heat of it, the flames of a devilish sunset always at your hocks.
He is running again, the the way he ran for his life, but
of course
this time it isn't his life he runs for.
Suffice to say he's moving fast, eating up the distance hungrily. You could not call it flying, not with a dragon above and before you. They cross the field and then it's up the mountain, up and up and up. And eventually-- Eik feels them with his magic, and suddenly he's not following the dragon or the crooked path but scrambling directly up the mountain, faster and faster towards towards the queen slick with magic and blood.
"Isra." He is there in her mind, easing his way between the pieces she rips herself into, running his touch over their edges (I'm coming--) like thumbing at shards of broken glass to better understand the way the shapes once fit together-- or how they might be rearranged. (It does not matter how glass can cut even a feather's touch, not when you love everything about it, from the way it gleams to the way it breaks.)
He feels it when blood spills from her nose and he cries out but only the mountain, and maybe the dragon, hears. Panic gives him wings and Up the rocky slope he rises until he finds himself panting beside Fable's quaking form.
(--I'm here)
In that moment, he could have picked up a rock-turned-blade and plunged it into Raum's heart.
He could have lunged and bit and kicked, and between the three of them, they would have made an altar of the cave, and a lamb of the wolf.
All these could's and might's and maybes stretch like flecks of foam on the raging ocean. But there is only one eventuality. So Eik slips past the dragon and the villain and the knives, hateful knives, so many knives until-- there-- her breath on his skin like its just the two of them at the start again, hearts trembling beneath the falling snow (why did we ever leave) with the dreams of bison pulled like a blanket over them.
Eik does not have time to sigh. He turns to angle himself between Isra and the mouth of the cave and lowers his head as though he had a horn poised to run through Raum, through the boy long gone, through anything and anyone that would dare to come between him and his salvation. His eyes are without depth as his magic thickens and spreads across the holy mountain, plunging him into a sea of thoughts and memories.
He does not blink.
"I KNOW WHAT YOU'RE AFRAID OF."
It is both his voice and not his voice, for it is deeper and, despite its silence, far louder than any sound he could produce with his throat. The message booms in the mind of every living thing in his magic's furious range, sending dark flocks of birds bursting from the trees.
@Raum @Isra @Abel (?)
ahh this is such an epic thread, I feel unworthy of joining but here we are
Time makes fools of us all
