But the hard prey is the one that won’t come bidden.
Vercingtorix was born a hunter.
It is all he has ever known. He comes to the fires to sell his soul to the practices of Novus; to pay homage to pagan gods he will never worship. His worries are written on a piece of parchment, already prepared to be enflamed. The list seems grossly inadequate, but his mother had always accused him of being a narcissistic like his father. What do you know of worry? she used to tell him, when he grew short with her concern for his wellbeing. Nothing, she would say. You will never be the mother to such an unruly son.
And so the list:
Boudika.
Boudika.
Boudika.
If she is alive, still, in Novus. If she is here at all, of it the sea took her even further. And, anyways, it is simple enough, the fixation of his purpose within the nation. Why not burn it? Why not watch the fire flare up and spark with embers, to watch his concerns burn? Torix had listened to the depth of the ceremony; and he would be a liar if there was not a small part of him hoping for the image of the woman who haunts him to appear within the billowing smoke. She doesn’t.
But someone else does.
Through the fire Vercingtorix drops the name into, he sees a series of images glint metallically upon a small horse’s flank.
At first, he does not move, but dismisses it as one of the strange native’s foreign (to him, at least) intricacies. But then: Torix realises they are familiar and hardly foreign at all.
No.
He remembers the way the flesh seared beneath the metallic paint, and the way the Old Priest muttered the arcane words of the Old Gods.
Binding a Soul always smelled of burnt flesh, piss, the early morning tide, full of death. Salt, and fish, and sand. His lip twitches; it almost becomes a sneer. And then Torix is weaving through the crowd in quiet, measured pursuit.
He has always been a hunter. It is the truth of Vercingtorix that defines him; it is the thing that drives him now to near-madness, as he exists in a world where the creatures he is meant to hunt no longer exist. Yet—here is one, familiar, known and he follows her stride past natives, past bonfires, until she stands on the dark stretch at the end of the gathering, staring out at the sea upon the cliffside.
Torix has watched her now for a portion of the night; and it is now and only now that he approaches. He is no less imposing, despite the limp that jars each step. By the time he reaches her, the sound of the bonfires seems distant; it is a crackling of fire and wood in the background to their meeting, and the crash of the sea.
“Saphira.”
Torix says her name and her name alone.
After all, you need the name to bind the Soul.
@Saphira
