STRUCK ME AS EXTREMELY FRIENDLY GHOSTS.
Fools.
It shouldn’t take a knife to the throat to realize how little your pride is worth. But that’s what happens, sometimes, when ego is all you have.
The guard’s pleas are pitiful but, as it turns out, pity is in short supply these days. Solterra was at war, if you could still call it that when all the players and the sides and the goals were unclear. It was brutal, unorganized, and violent. Eik resented it as much as he would a bit or a cage– for that is what Solterra was to him now. Even at night with the open sky above him and the endless sands of the Mors before him, a view unchanged for decades, perhaps centuries, except for the shifting of the dunes– everything was different now.
It brought him down, down, down.
Eik has to brace himself to keep from shuddering as the woman’s neck is snapped. She made a choice to be here. Eik and Mathias made choices too.
“Are you all right?” Eik has to force neutrality into his voice. He has to try to temper his bleeding heart because such a thing was dangerous at a time like this. Such a thing was a terrible, terrible weakness and he was not allowed to be weak. He could be lonely and starving and dehydrated but he could not be soft of heart, not now. Not for a long time, maybe not ever again.
(he shuts the doors, locks the windows on all the voices that cry out in anguish– in mourning for all the soft warm sand that he paves over with concrete. It was home to tortoises, and coyotes, and over fifty kinds of cacti. Now it’s just cold, hard efficiency.)
He grabs a fallen frond with his telekinesis and drapes it over the fallen body, and then another. Then he takes a step toward the other stallion, reaching out his nose as though… as though to what? What possible comfort could the scarred grey stallion, more stranger than not, give?
What was the point?
He turns toward the water, and begins to fill his bag. “We should move soon,” his voice is sand-dry. “Which way are you going?” As soon as he asks, he wishes he could take it back. It would probably be better not to know.
FROM THE SAME FAMILY
@
Time makes fools of us all
