There is something about the man that reminds Zayir of the stray dogs that used to be commonplace in the Solterran capitol, odds and strays that darted about the streets and shied from the hooves of horses. Yet they were brazen, and savvy, and it was difficult to underestimate creatures that were so grizzled.
Nowhere. The man’s voice is the desert’s voice: thirsting, rough. Zayir nearly judges the answer, but then acknowledges—to himself, at least—that he might have given the same answer. Zayir assesses the other man. There is a certain irony to discovering another wanderer in his trek out of Solterra; the desert is vast, and there is no reason for their trajectories to intersect as they had. Zayir knows he could walk for miles—days, even—without encountering another. The sands bake around them; the heat wafts off and reflects under his eyes so that everything takes on a temporal brightness. The stranger is dark where Zayir is predominately light; stark where Zayir is metallically gleaming. The man’s mane is clipped short, militarily; broad of chest and shoulder; but somehow Zayir finds him utterly unremarkable. If he had passed Noam in a crowd, he would not have looked at the man twice.
For one who hunts. The dunes will show me where I must go. The answer, to Zayir, seems cryptic. This annoys him and so he asks, “What does that mean? What are you hunting? Zayir feels as if he is slipping into a daydream of impossible questions and impossible answers, where nothing about this encounter makes sense. He begins to wonder if the heat is getting to him.
You look Solterran. “So do you.”
Why come here? There’s nothing here.
Zayir is stepping as if to move on from the conversation, back into the desert. This stops him, and he turns to cock his ears in a way that resembles curiosity. He has always had a way about him, when he directs his interest, that is too intense: he fixes Noam with his eyes now in a stare that belongs less to a horse and more to a falcon. “Do you mean why come to Solterra? Or to this spot?”
Zayir tongues his teeth before answering. “If you mean the first, I was born here. Solterra is in my blood—but…” he trails off, before regaining confidence. “If you are asking the second question, I’m in this spot because I am leaving Solterra.”
There is nothing left for me here.
But even as he explains himself, Zayir realises how contradictory his statement is. How can he, in the same breath, confess the desert is in his blood while betraying it in the next one?
He blinks sweat from his eyes and glances away, toward a small arroyo with bursting desert shrub. “Perhaps we could both use the companionship. The heat is said to make men lose their minds.” Zayir gestures toward the shade of the shrub, an invitation, although he cannot say what compels him to do so.
"Speaks" || @
swift, blazing flag of the regiment
lion with crest of red and gold
