I'm the hero of this story
I don't need to be saved
I don't need to be saved
August has never had so much time to himself, and the temptation to get into trouble is like a fly always buzzing just outside his reach.
He should have grown out of it by now. But maybe losing his childhood to the Scarab (to the war) had only postponed it until he found himself free of duties, and schedules, and anyone needing him. Or maybe he just resents Solterra enough that it’s turned him into a petulant boy in search of destruction, self or other.
At the moment he’s innocent, slouching hip-cocked in the shadows to avoid the afternoon sun, watching strangers like there’s something to learn from them. For a while now his bright silver gaze has been caught by a boy praying, one whose stillness can only speak to fervor. It might have made him uneasy, except that he thinks of Caligo’s monk in his mountain temple, kneeling in shadow the way this man is in harsh daylight. August had always thought money made a more agreeable god; it, at least, did as intended when you wielded it, could be touched and kept.
But it isn’t the boy’s piety that drew his gaze back, and back again. It is the robes, clearly significant but whose meaning August is ignorant of, and the black collar around his neck, and the scarred and staring eye in the middle of his forehead. Some passersby stare at him, and some ignore him utterly, but the only thing of the boy that moves at all is the fluttering of his robes in the breeze, until at length he straightens.
That might have been the end of it, except the unicorn still doesn’t move. August can make out the glint of a red eye from across the square, but not what it might be looking at. A few moments more and he finds himself crossing the sand and bricks, the fountain burbling nearer, the shadows of pigeons cutting across his path in crazed and twisting patterns.
Up close the boy is perhaps more unsettling, but August is familiar with things both stranger and worse. His feelings, instead, hover between pity and curiosity and that gnawing need for trouble.
“Hey,” he says, his voice soft over the laughing fountain. “Can I ask you something?”
@Jask
