STONE IS THE FACE OF PATIENCE
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story / and you are somewhere in it / and it will never end until it all ends.
Today I am more like a breeze than usual.
I say that I have been the wind before, but I did not understand what wind was before I left the Gold. I did not know how strong it could be, how violent – I knew it as nothing more than a delicate fluttering among autumn leaves, an unseen force that kisses you on the lips and runs itself through your hair. When I was the wind, I was not violent. I flowed, soft and slow and gentle, like a caress. (I think that it is the gentlest thing that I have ever been. My other lives have been cutting or strangling or snapping, intent, despite death’s inevitable touch, on survival. The wind is different, but it is no longer itself after a gust. I was only it for a moment, and that moment was a lifetime.)
I skip down the cobbled pathways of city sidewalks in a swirl of chestnut-and-hazel. I am in no rush, but my steps are hurried regardless, and the court feels somehow electric; I am still unaccustomed to the push-and-pull of crowds, to the cacophony of sight and smell and taste. Walking down the street is a sensory overload. I relish it. My lives have been so simple, so far. This world is not so simple at all.
The world is lovely and gold, and I walk while looking up, or around – in any way but the way that I am supposed to be going. I’ve noticed that most of the people who live in the city don’t spend their time staring up, although the buildings and the statues and the windows are all so wonderful and strange. I wonder how much time I spent staring up into the boughs of the great, ancient autumn-oak trees of my homeland. I wonder if we all take the world for granted, once we get used to it.
(I wonder how long it will take me to grow used to Novus. Winter’s chill already bites less by the day.)
I am so focused on the parts of the city that sprawl out above me that I collide – barely – with someone. Not hard enough to send us tumbling, or to so much as bruise. Only enough to push, and, even then, I am quick as a cat to recede when I feel the push of his skin to mine.
He is – as tall as I am, but lighter, more delicate. (Not a knight, certainly.) Near every inch of him is coated in some shade of gold or another, save for a speckling of white here and there, and the white of his hair, and the sharp blue of his eyes. He has antlers, but they do not quite resemble those of a deer, and something like scales grow on his shoulder and hip, though they do not look, either, like the scales of any reptile or fish that I have ever seen.
“I apologize, sir,” I say, quickly, with an apologetic dip of my head, “I wasn’t watching where I was going.”
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"Speech!"
EVERYTHING IS RISK, SHE WHISPERED.if you doubt, it becomes sand trickling through skeletal fingers.☙❧please tag Nic! contact is encouraged, short of violence
