He could not explain exactly what he was experiencing or why, but it was like what he imagined poison to feel like as it crept along your veins. It was a very heavy darkness, a leaden-limbed rot, but it was not in him. It was in the island.
“You feel that?” He asks Isra. The answer is in her eyes as she looks at him, all glorious and wicked and– and righteous glee. The weapon in her sharpens to a fine point and longs for something to sink into. (He knows. He feels it too, although with far more trepidation.)
Then they begin to hear stories. Deaths, disappearances. The earth opening up and swallowing horses whole. And then the sun stops. The sun stops and he knows they’re playing a whole new game now, and the stakes are much higher.
Two stars higher.
“Love,” he says as softly as he can, thinking this might be a thing she does not want to hear: “I think you should go.” He nuzzles her belly, feels the twin stars that smile in their warm briny sleep.
It hurts to say you instead of we– how long ago was it that he said he was going home with her? Days? Hours? Somehow he lost track, in the haze of love and magic and wonder. But he knows he can’t leave yet. There are people here that might need him– Asterion and Moira and Seraphina. Solterrans (rebels and traitors alike). Denoctians too now.
(and, selfishly, he wants to see what mysteries the island has left to offer)
“I’ll be home–” he does not even think of how that word, and how easily it slips out, sounds a little like traitor. He’s too busy thinking of the next word, which he wants to be soon, but he won’t make a promise he can’t keep– not again. So the word dies in his throat before it ever lives. Instead he just nods.
He knows she'll understand. It still feels like another heaviness, another betrayal, one of what is becoming many.
"I'll be home."
@Isra ugh PLEASE excuse this I just need a few more signos for baby
STAFF EDIT***
@Eikhas rolled a 5! He has been awarded +300 signos.
Time makes fools of us all
