in the end, everyone is aware of this: nobody keeps any of what he has, and life is only a borrowing of bones.
T
he morning after the flood, there is little left in his cottage that is salvageable. His dried herbs and medicines are soaked and in disarray; his diaries so wet the pages rip and tear, and the ink has run to the point they are ineligible. The gaping hole in the roof will require significant carpentry skills to repair. Pravda does not believe he has any belongings that will not require some sort of replacement or, if nothing else, repair.
Around the cottage, the lowermost branches of trees are strewn with blankets and other bedding materials. Books are laid out, in a relatively orderly fashion, on the driest of the blankets in a pocket of sunshine. It is one of those mornings, after a storm, that seems so pristine there couldn’t have possibly been a storm to shake the rafters, to flood the streets, to set the Viride trembling with the wind. No: the forest is fresh and new with the rain, everything greener, more vivid. The birds sing almost too merrily.
Pravda, meanwhile, feels more disheveled than he can remember having felt, since he was a child. A child in his first life, that is.
His braids are unkempt; his eyes are dark, and tired, from a sleepless night spent at the mercy of the storm. He stands watching the books dry, a bit aimless in his—current circumstances. Pravda has only read of such tragedies, he has never been forced to endure one. His mind is still filled with the cracking of the ceiling and the cold running of the water through the floor of his cottage; he glances up towards the sun dappling through the trees, and then toward the ruined diaries.
Prigovora sprawls out in another patch of sunshine, yawning widely. His teeth catch that same light, and Pravda flinches at the high-pitched screech Prigovora makes with the gesture.
Behind him, the main beam of the cottage cracks and folds in half.
