I'm the hero of this story
I don't need to be saved
I don't need to be saved
There is a steady rain that feels almost like a meditation, the way it drowns out everything else. Aside from the occasional call of a crow or trill of a woodpecker from the cover of the trees there is no sound but the shh of water, cold against his back.
It’s not particular intent that brings him to the edge of Vitreus Lake - it’s just somewhere to go, somewhere away from the noise and smoke of the city. Maybe he expected his thoughts to clear, out here, but they remain as stubbornly obfuscated as the mist that shrouds the lake.
Here Isra had left him, here Erasmus had found him.
And here, like waking after the trials of the island, he wonders what would have happened if they…hadn’t.
But August’s mind has always been too busy for such maudlin thoughts. Still, it’s a ghost sort of day, and so he’s not entirely surprised when it’s another ghost he sees - some some kind of black swan, as he had at first thought, spreading her wings out over the water.
He’s relieved to see her, alive and…well, herself. But he also feels guilt, like he’d swallowed a chunk of peridotite. On the shore of the lake with the water up to his ankles and the pebbles and mud beneath his feet he waits for her to address him, and he doesn’t have to wait long.
Warset is not quite looking at him, or maybe it’s only the mist obscuring things. The palomino clears his throat, digs a hoof deeper in the rock and watches silt cloud the water. “You seemed to have it well in hand,” he says. A pause, and then, “I was a coward. I’m sorry.”
He doesn’t ask if the man is alive or dead. He doesn’t care about that, or Solterra. Orestes is gone (thanks the gods for that), the desert is crown less again, and he has been proven right about its temperament and that of its leaders. The sand can have it, as far as he’s concerned.
But she is something else. He’d thought she was Solterran (though the only thing she’d said was that she was from there, and motioned up to the heavens), but he supposed a pegasus could go wherever they wanted. How freeing that must be.
“I take it you made it out okay,” he says, because he needs something to say, and because she’s standing before him so it must be true.
@Warset
