and yes, you’re a too bright disease
He’s never found the desert lonely. He supposes most people would take a single look at the vast sands, abandoned and untraveled as they are, and they’d it so, and he doesn’t blame them really. He does wonder, though, why the sky is not regarded with the same pessimism. Zakariah is convinced staring up too long would take his sanity, slowly. And see, because for something so fucking busy and colorful and bright and ever changing…
I mean, it was awful empty wasn’t it?
He’s not once seen a god in all those stars. He’s not once seen some other worldly being in the sun. He’s not once found purpose in all those stars, or all those clouds. And really you’d think, if there was anything so divine to be seen, it’d be in the sky, wouldn’t it? It’d be up there, somewhere, and Zakariah hasn’t seen shit.
It doesn’t occur to him that the sky is alien to him, now. ( Or perhaps, more accurately, fear inspiring. To be imprisoned beneath the earth, then returned to everything all at once could bring good men to madness. And Zakariah couldn’t truly call himself good, or much a man. He looks to the sky and frost spills into his veins, his stomach gapes wide, and a cold sweat settles into his hide. He used to live beneath this, once. Once, he used to run beneath it and find a joy in its heat upon his back.
Now, it’s oppressive. It’s an atlas weight, and his knees are weak. )
The sand is familiar. This place, seemingly desolate and uninhabitable as it is, is familiar. And if you walk long enough, you will find company, dead or alive. This time company finds him. He doesn’t mind. He hears her before he sees her.
“For as awful as this place is, I can’t seem to stop running into people here.”
She looks far more pleasant than she sounds, least in the eyes. They’re blue, but not like the sky. He’s never seen the ocean, but he’s read of it. The texts describe it as siren songed. Something with depths unseen, tantalizing enough to tempt but dark enough not to be easily explored. Beautiful as it was deadly. He’s read of drowning, of how water takes one’s lungs as their home and leaves nothing else, of how the vision darkens and the chest heaves and the ocean holds you close - a fly in a trap.
He imagines her eyes are kind of like that, like the sea.
“Awful as it is, here you are,” he muses. "Are you lost, then?"
So many were, here. Most in fact, in one way or another. The desert had its own siren song of sorts, didn't it?
“Or just looking for company?”
@Sabrina / speaks / notes
