you have heard the stories about how the dead have already cried, like crushed grass and wilted flowers and memories carved into stone, then forgotten.
Childhood.
They wonder, sometimes, what it must have been like, in the clenched fist of a church built on the black stone of fear. Jask has never answered.
There are many children without a childhood, many names by which to call an orphan, or a soldier, or a monk. Jask has never stopped to wonder what he would call himself if it is not 'servant.' He has never paused to look back through the annals of time to find what childhood he did or did not have, soaked through with blood and dread and prayer.
Solterra is spinning, spinning around Jask as he stands in a circle of perfect stillness, only the wind with its hand in his robes to call him back from the void. The sun sits in the dish of his face, pooling in the rut of his bright scar, spilled off the curve of eyelid after eyelid after eyelid. The fountain burbles, and burbles, and burbles and Jask watches each drop shine like gems in the midday sun.
He does not see August, at first--or, if he does, he does not seem to. Any soft gold in his periphery is met with the same unflinching quiet as everything else, the sharp red of an eye rolling in the other's direction only once he has said: can I ask you something?
Jask turns, head first, then body, and pulls his face into some uncanny facsimile of placid agreement. It is a practiced expression, and a mechanical one, and it might be whole and delighted if it were not so terribly empty like the desert around them.
"Of course," he says, the way mothers might say it: too warm, too quiet, a voice backlit by the red of his robes and the red of his eyes and the read of the sharp point of his horn thrust up toward the sky. "What do you need?"
He might have been anxious, if he could be anything at all.
jask
They wonder, sometimes, what it must have been like, in the clenched fist of a church built on the black stone of fear. Jask has never answered.
There are many children without a childhood, many names by which to call an orphan, or a soldier, or a monk. Jask has never stopped to wonder what he would call himself if it is not 'servant.' He has never paused to look back through the annals of time to find what childhood he did or did not have, soaked through with blood and dread and prayer.
Solterra is spinning, spinning around Jask as he stands in a circle of perfect stillness, only the wind with its hand in his robes to call him back from the void. The sun sits in the dish of his face, pooling in the rut of his bright scar, spilled off the curve of eyelid after eyelid after eyelid. The fountain burbles, and burbles, and burbles and Jask watches each drop shine like gems in the midday sun.
He does not see August, at first--or, if he does, he does not seem to. Any soft gold in his periphery is met with the same unflinching quiet as everything else, the sharp red of an eye rolling in the other's direction only once he has said: can I ask you something?
Jask turns, head first, then body, and pulls his face into some uncanny facsimile of placid agreement. It is a practiced expression, and a mechanical one, and it might be whole and delighted if it were not so terribly empty like the desert around them.
"Of course," he says, the way mothers might say it: too warm, too quiet, a voice backlit by the red of his robes and the red of his eyes and the read of the sharp point of his horn thrust up toward the sky. "What do you need?"
He might have been anxious, if he could be anything at all.
