Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
There is no place better to practice flying than Terminus Sea. Most of it is far from Solterra, and the ocean brings with it heavy winds at an altitude. Zayir has taken to using the seaside to strengthen the muscles used for flight. The catacombs caused much of his musculature to atrophy. This embarrasses him greatly, and so he has taken to conditioning far from any onlookers.
Zayir uses an updraft to glide. His wings remain fully extended and he hovers, more or less, in the same position as the wind gusts from the sea. Being in the catacombs for so long, Zayir had realised many things.
One of them was his love for flying. Those were his most constantly revisited memories. Soaring, diving, coasting—manoeuvres of acrobatics, and the whole desert sprawled out beneath him as if he were a young god. He had felt, once, as if he would be able to fly across the sea he gazes out across now.
And yes, now—he is brought into the present moment with a vengeance—his pectoral and shoulder muscles strain with the prolonged fatigue of flying. Zayir gets out of breath when ascending to altitude rapidly and, once there, he tires quickly. The reason he uses the sea is because to remain in the air takes fewer wing strokes—the wind is a safety precaution.
But now the wind has died. Zayir begins to strike his wings but they have already reached their capacity—they are hardly strong enough, at the moment, to hold his weight. He begins to descend as carefully as he can manage and, in doing so, catches sight of two stallions on the seaside.
He would like to do nothing more than leave them alone. But his descent is abrupt and leaves him only a few yards away. Zayir does his best to make the entire thing appear intentional. He shakes out his wings and then tucks them neatly against his shoulders, to disguise the way that the fine muscles tremble as a newborn foal’s would, the first time they finished a flight.
Zayir tries to still his heart rate. It thunders in his ears. He tries to prevent his breathing from appearing too laboured. He feels weak. Delicate, even. Zayir does not recognise these stallions.
But that is because everyone he had ever known is dead, by now. Unless they were entombed with him.
“I apologise for disturbing you.” Zayir says, evenly. It is an effort to keep his voice as calm as it is. He arrives just in time to hear the tail-end of what the blanketed stallion was saying. Does the sky look different on the other side of the ocean?
Zayir glances out at the sea. He remembers, once, a journey across it and the way at the end their ship rowed up a deep and seemingly endless river. There, the sky had been cut-blue, like polished angelite stones. Zayir does not share this. That seemed like another life from this one, but even the sky here isn’t exactly as he remembers it. He says politely, “I am Zayir. If I have interrupted, I can continue on.” He thinks, then, of the long walk back to Solterra. In that other life, the trip would have been brief and air-borne. But even now his muscles continue to ache, and tremble, and the journey seems to belong to a younger man.
This, of course, he cannot admit. Not even to himself.
There is a heaviness in Ipomoea’s measured voice, and a weight upon the the white stallion’s scarred body. Zayir recognises warriors when he sees them, and attempts to find some semblance of solace in this; perhaps that is the same, the nobility of men at arms.
It does not occur to him he could be wrong about that, too.
"Speech." || @Ipomoea @
the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned;
the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity
