jane
Galileo was quiet while Jane made her presence known, and she was aware of him analysing her. She wondered why; she certainly couldn’t resemble anyone he knew. Not with his head of horns, with a positively leonine tail curling between his hind hooves. She analysed him back, not for any real purpose.
But that time on the sands had gone so fast that she had hardly had a chance to gain her bearings. If she had interpreted anything, it had been promptly lost among hallucinations of dehydration and trauma. Like an oasis in the sands, memory crumbled and fell apart; lost to the ache of huger.
It hadn’t been terribly long that she had gone with Galileo, barely a night and a day, but for Jane it was so much more than that. While she had been at the Terminus Sea, she had known herself. She had been Jane of Angora, lady-in-waiting. She had been somebody, and here she was nobody at all. At most, she is the stranger girl, the one with the funny accent, the one with the archaic words who tried too hard.
She thanked him, and of course he rejected it. What soldier wouldn’t? “Of course you don’t,” Jane mused, flicking her tail. “I’m fairly used to being alone, but at least before I could recognise an accent, or speak my mother tongue, or-” She didn’t really know what it was she missed. She could barely say what home was, so sheltered was she. “It was so much easier at home.” Jane sighed, for she knew that she would never be home again. She belonged nowhere, and that was the most painful knowledge of them all.
What do you aim to do here?, he asked, but she could hear the meaning beneath it. Jane glanced over the bar, to where the sand roiled and broiled, the colour of copper beneath the sun. She thought to herself that she had never felt the sun like this in Angora. It was so much more violent here. “I have no idea,” Jane confessed, “I honestly don’t know what there is to do here. I got sent here because they didn’t want me at home anymore, and then I found out that my aunt and uncle had no idea I was coming at all,” she laughed a little, bitterly, spit it out between notes of childish humour. “So right now, I’m just coasting on charity. I suppose I’d like to do something with my life, but what would I know? I’m just a silly mare, anyway.”
@[Galileo] / speaks / here you go!
