Red painted the desert a bloody hue as the sun began its slow descent behind the Veneror peak filling the sky with the same colour of war. The evening steadily approached and with it came the promise of a respite from the heated gaze of Solis’ eye. Though Novus was gripped between the icy claws of winter, Soltera remained a land of fiery colours and suffocating heat. Even now, with the worst of the day over, the air still clung to any creature that wandered, still close and heavy and warm.
Sobec had chosen this time of day specifically to traverse the perilous deserts of Solterra, the dunes and canyons that had once been her home. Though the main city had changed whilst the Arete were held captive by time- the buildings developing, the faces changing- the desert remained the same. It was as though it too had been kept in the time cage, frozen in its state, never changing, never aging. Even before the catacombs, before Sobec had joined the Arete she’d never taken the time to wander the sands of her home, to reminisce. Her youth seemed like a life time ago, and in some sense it was, yet she walked the edges of the Elatus canyon without even looking, her hooves taking her of their own accord.
There was nothing left of the Sivalu, not a whisper on the wind or a fleck of fur in the sand. It was almost as though they’d never existed at all, the Hisada had wiped them out so thoroughly. Sobec was the last of them, as far as she knew, one of the few Solterans who had been raised in the relentless desert. Rarely did the survivor allow herself to be encumbered by such feelings, to allow her past to drag her back, stop her from moving forward. But that evening, as the sun went down on a dying day in a world that had changed whilst she’d stayed the same, Sobec allowed the threads of her soul to slowly unravel.
@Leto c:
