EIK
OF WHITE ROOTS AND ASH
*
Eik hasn’t walked this way since his daughters were born. But even after two years, he could do it with his eyes closed. Small details have changed, like the creosote and juniper grown slightly taller, and the washes grown broad by a generous spring, but the old landmarks are still there where he remembers them. Some of them he had forgotten about, until he sees them and remembers: The vipers love the sun-facing walls past that old burned tree, or I once climbed that rock with Vadim, nimble as a mountain goat.
It’s the oddest thing to go down a path you’ve walked a hundred times. The body seizes with excitement. It doesn’t matter how much time has passed, the body has no sense of time & change. It says “I’m going home. The markets will just be getting busy. A late morning breeze will come in off the ocean. Seraphina will be in her library.”
Seraphina, Bexley, Eik.
Jaxis, Maxence, Avdotya, Mathias.
Rhoswen.
He could go on, and some part of him always does, repeating names come and gone, come and gone.
Why let go what you can carry?)
Eik had always loved the canyons, and he took his time crossing them. At times he stopped just to press his cheek to the colored sandstone walls. (Aspara always wished she could read minds, and Eik would trade anything for her power to speak with rocks and roots, seeds and earth- the two of them are creatures of wish and worry.) When he emerged from the Elatus, the court and its proud walls lay across the sands before him, lit in the warm glow of late morning sun. He picked up his pace, turning his thoughts away from ghosts and toward the living.
-
“Asterion.” The two men stand before each other, each with his own baggage. When picturing this moment, Eik thought it would be filled with uncertainties. A balancing act of who they used to be with who they are now. But for all the distance each man’s life has taken him, and all the months and years that sit between them, when they are pressed forehead to forehead it feels like no time has passed at all. Their breaths mingle, in and out as one.
When Asterion says “I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again,” it aches for Eik to hear his own fears said out loud. “I knew you’d be back,” the grey says easily, banishing thoughts of I didn’t know if I’d still be here. Asterion doesn’t look a day older than the last time they saw each other, but Eik could not say the same about himself. The differences were subtle, but still there: the lines around his eyes are deepened, and his dapples are just a little paler. Across his muzzle are errant flecks of white. All of him is headed for the washed-out white of a ghost. His daughters laugh as they count his white hairs on his chin and say he looks wiser every day. Isra never laughs with them.
It feels good to be back in his city. No matter it’s no longer his by any measure except sentiment. The winter air is warm and dry. “Come.” As he turns them toward the market he is careful not to look at the statue Asterion stood beneath- but his heart leans toward it and his magic reaches out in wonder- is there a mind and heart to the stone? If there is, it does not respond to the gentle knock of his magic.
(And if Eik thinks for a moment he can hear a whimper in the dark expanse of stone, he tells himself he’s mistaken, the sound was nothing but the wind and it’s tricks.)
For a while it’s companionable silence. The easy, familiar quiet they knew so well, interrupted only by the sound of their steps on the worn dirt side streets. “It feels good to be back here,” Eik admits finally, thoughtful. He is surprised; despite how much he missed this place, he thought coming back would make him feel like a character fallen from a story and then gracelessly reentered several chapters later. Instead it’s seamless, easy. The desert did not ever embrace, except in death, but it at least did not turn Eik away, and for that he was grateful. “How was it, when you returned to Terrastella?” He glances at his friend almost shyly, wondering at the shadow he noticed in the bay's smile.
Time makes fools of us all
