When the smoke clears at dawn, Caine takes to the skies.
In the days after the first cloud of black ash marked the beginning of what he has since dubbed (privately, and with undue irony) the Panic, Caine has almost managed to forget all about the imminent disaster rolling in from yonder.
Even the coming of the end of the world — as the doomsayers and fisher wives of the market like to shriek into the ears of anyone near — can’t keep a man (and spy and assassin) from his work. If anything, the Panic has only made it easier.
He ducks his head into his chest and coughs. Pockets of ash are nestled deep within the clouds, trapped there by the mist, and he has flown right through one. Sealing his lips and flattening his nostrils, he tucks his wings like a falcon and angles into a dive. Best to get out of the ash cloud before it blinds him.
Nose first in his dive, Caine’s eyes widen as they snag on a figure of red streaking past like a pint-sized comet. “Elif?”
Snapping his wings outwards to slow his descent, he sucks air through his teeth as the current drags him down further and further. His shoulders ache as he fights fiercely against the wind. In the grey haze he knows he has lost her, but he is not too bothered. Caine is almost certain about her destination.
The same as his.
Soon enough, he drags himself back up to the correct elevation and does not look down again until the horizon looms up in a strange green divide, and the crowd of Denoctians on the beach swarm busier than ants.
He touches down behind Elif with a soft whoosh against the volcanic rock. He ignores the others around them — the girl she is talking to, he barely notices — and steps up besides her to drag his gaze up towards the wall of what seems to be ivy. Then farther up, seeking the blue, blue sky. Which never comes.
“I tried to fly past it, but I reckon it reaches so far up it splits Solis’ dwellings in two.” That is, if the sun god hasn’t willed it into existence himself. Caine's smile curls in a self-satisfied way. He wouldn’t put it past him.
In the days after the first cloud of black ash marked the beginning of what he has since dubbed (privately, and with undue irony) the Panic, Caine has almost managed to forget all about the imminent disaster rolling in from yonder.
Even the coming of the end of the world — as the doomsayers and fisher wives of the market like to shriek into the ears of anyone near — can’t keep a man (and spy and assassin) from his work. If anything, the Panic has only made it easier.
He ducks his head into his chest and coughs. Pockets of ash are nestled deep within the clouds, trapped there by the mist, and he has flown right through one. Sealing his lips and flattening his nostrils, he tucks his wings like a falcon and angles into a dive. Best to get out of the ash cloud before it blinds him.
Nose first in his dive, Caine’s eyes widen as they snag on a figure of red streaking past like a pint-sized comet. “Elif?”
Snapping his wings outwards to slow his descent, he sucks air through his teeth as the current drags him down further and further. His shoulders ache as he fights fiercely against the wind. In the grey haze he knows he has lost her, but he is not too bothered. Caine is almost certain about her destination.
The same as his.
Soon enough, he drags himself back up to the correct elevation and does not look down again until the horizon looms up in a strange green divide, and the crowd of Denoctians on the beach swarm busier than ants.
He touches down behind Elif with a soft whoosh against the volcanic rock. He ignores the others around them — the girl she is talking to, he barely notices — and steps up besides her to drag his gaze up towards the wall of what seems to be ivy. Then farther up, seeking the blue, blue sky. Which never comes.
“I tried to fly past it, but I reckon it reaches so far up it splits Solis’ dwellings in two.” That is, if the sun god hasn’t willed it into existence himself. Caine's smile curls in a self-satisfied way. He wouldn’t put it past him.
@Elif @Random Events | "speaks" | notes: slipping this in past the deadline because caine needs that swp exp c':
