Pan feels very sleepy, but he fights to keep awake. His otter chitters with alarm, winding himself over and over again around Pan’s neck like a wreath. Tiny hands roam over his face, feeling every part of him, before the creature dives back into the satchel and begins to draw forth all manner of baubles to place them before his master. Bits of golden thread, smooth river rocks, and iridescent shells pile up before the boy, as Oliver continues to make love offerings, hoping they would be enough. “Ollie… stop… it’s okay. It’s okay now. He’s going to make it better.”
The boy manages a weak laugh, as his seafoam eyes find Pravda’s, expecting to find humor there too, but finding a new hardness over the concern. Clearly, he thought Pan a troublemaker, and for a moment the boy regrets his admission about the book, trying to explain. ”It’s not like that, exactly… I didn’t mean to steal it. I borrowed it to learn, and then I just kept reading it – over and over and over. I couldn’t return it, not yet… I’m not done with it. I need to know all of the plants, so I can help the healers.” Muttering softly under his breath, he thinks back to the grass which put him in the predicament. “Clearly, I still have a lot to learn.”
The burn was fading some, his vision clear enough to see the festival in the distance, and Pan longs to join them. He tries to stand, teetering for a moment before falling back to the ground and staying still, understanding that he was too weak to push himself. But it wasn’t in his nature to sit still for long, and he was itching to get back to the party. So he does the next best thing, focusing on the story that Pravda told, his brow furrowing in confusion when the stranger mentions Prigovora being a manifestation of the worst in him. “You seem alright to me… thanks for helping – you and him both.”
When the stranger mentions Oliver, he turns with a smile to stare at his furry friend. “I didn’t find Oliver, he found me… a long time ago. He didn’t always look like this. In the beginning, he was more of a ghost or something, but then the magic changed him and made him whole.” It didn’t make much sense, but then, the boy could have easily been addled by the plant. Whether or not Pravda would take his words as truth or fiction remained to be seen, but stranger things had happened here in Novus with the magic too.
“I just want to go home,” the boy whispers, thinking of his cave by the river in Delumine. And in that moment, he is more the lost boy than he’d been in some time, his green eyes wide with fear as he wonders if his body would ever feel right again.
@Pravda
