like fishhooks; an old kind of hunger
When this encounter first began, I did not think to recognize any of myself in the stranger, with wings that flutter so delicately at his ankles. I recognized only the restlessness; the sense of disbelonging. No. But maybe it is what Solterra wants, or needs, or dreams of, he answers, and in his answer there is something deeper, something unspoken that I am not privy to understanding. I do not look away; not when Ipomoea turns to me with an attention as bright as Solis’s own. I recognize the look of someone analyzing my scars; taking stock of them, as one might read the covers of old books. They tell you nothing, I want to say, but the words are choked like so much dust in the air. They do not tell you the truth of me.
For some reason, I cannot look at the sands now; I do not want to witness the turmoil below, the violence wrought for entertainment and entertainment alone. It seems barbaric even to me, and—
He smiles, revealing something of himself he had not before. There is an edge; what I had mistook for tension might, instead, be violence. The kind of violence that rests quietly beneath the surface; unspoken of.
And what do you need? I do not think you will find it here in the stands.
It is more complicated, than that.
“It is not in the sands, either.” My tone is thick; I glance away, to the crowd of carrion-feasters, the crowd that thirsts and bays for the blood of others. Not like this, I think. Not like this.
There is no nobility in this conflict; no honor in this death. I turn to look at him again, with harder eyes, with less softness. “Why come to a place that may want, or need, or dream of your blood spilt out on the sand?” I cannot help the question that rises, unbidden, to my lips. But it seems unfair to ask such as deep truth, without offering one of my own:
“This is a small man’s way of understanding war,” I state. “Of understanding suffering, at the expense of—of decency.” The gawkish bystanders remind me too much of children—perhaps even myself, at the academy. When I had first seen a battlefield, a true battlefield, it had been as a boy. And we had been so naive, back then; so eager to witness what our father’s went to war for. Most do not think of how seawater can churn pinkish-gray with enough blood; or the smell of salt and flesh; or the precise sound a guidon flag makes, snapping in the wind, where the staff had broken off into the sand.
No, I think. I will not find what I need anywhere else again. My war was already won and—with it over, what is left?
