Zayir wants to leave Solterra.
He wants to leave it forever.
It occurs to him, fresh from the catacombs, that he has spent too much of his life in this desert that wants no one. In this inhospitable, wretched place, a land that never wanted to be colonised. Zayir thinks of this long and hard after his emergence; in the uncertain days that follow, he is uncertain what Arete are alive or dead. He doesn’t know anything. Even the name of the new Sovereign seems foreign—Orestes—and everything, everything else.
Zayir is no longer in a world he knows.
And so when he goes out to the desert, he thinks it is to leave. Perhaps he can find passage on a ship from Denocte, into the great wide sea beyond. Perhaps he can even return—and Zayir can barely manage the courage to think it—Inebu-Hedji, the White City. Perhaps that is the same—
and in his hoping, he realises he has been imprisoned—or dead, or lost, or forgotten—for ten years.
Nothing is as it was.
Except the desert, of course. The endless desert, that loves nothing. He is walking rather than flying, a hurried and out-of-breath gesture. Despite his body remaining virtually unchanged, physically he feels… depleted.
Zayir might have trekked into the desert until he was either lost or dead. He might have done it, as dejected as he is. But then he sees a shape descend sharply from the sky and he is reminded, even more sharply, flying with such grace and precision would be impossible for him at the moment. The sight feels him with an ire so intense Zayir nearly snaps aloud.
It is mere chance that crosses the two mens trajectories. But it does. And as they pass Zayir asks, more sharply than he intends, “Where are you going?”
"Speaks" || @
swift, blazing flag of the regiment
lion with crest of red and gold
