[P] Your ten foot pole

[Eik]

She sways and smiles that ghost of a smile and looks like a queen of sand and salt and sun. She could sink a blade between his eyes and he wouldn't blink. And when Eik learns she is not from here, he raises his gaze to her in pleasant surprise. It is fun, sometimes, to be wrong. It certainly is not boring. He's already left behind thoughts of winter- it was a silly question anyway, for he will soon experience it for himself.

On second look he still cannot see that she is not a native to this place. Perhaps it is the confidence in her shoulders, perhaps everywhere she goes, she looks like she owns the place. "I thought... well, you look like the sun kissed you." A small, amused smile curls at the edge of his lips, and fades again. "Where do you come from?" His curiosity is straightforward and undemanding- he does not pretend to be uninterested her response, but would not feel snubbed if she evaded the question.

Her own question sounds like a flat tire and he wonders if she is asking just to be polite. But she does not seem like the type of woman who wastes time on pleasantries. At least not with men of little importance. (and so the assumptions continue.) "I arrived not long after you- between spring and summer." The desert flowers had just begun to die- in hindsight, it seems like a warning of sorts.

It feels like so long ago- summer is long here.

Just as the seasons pass, he feels change stirring in him, too. Slow but steady and undeniable-- he resists but this only makes his bones ache and his head hurt, as though this change were physical.

(what about me it whispers, you think you're outgrowing me??

you think you're some child of the sun now?)

She speaks, and his dark, silent world fades in a blink. He forces his thoughts back to Maxence, and nods his head absently, thinking more about the tone in her voice than the commander himself. There are many things he could say-- he chooses his words carefully, as always. "I wonder how things would be different if he were still here." Eik could have been taken by the teryr and not a thing would have changed in this world. But the death of Maxence, that had changed something.

The future has never seemed certain to Eik. Like looking to the horizon and never knowing-- not really-- what lies past it until you're there. And now; now he is particularly aware of the chaos of time, the possibility of loss and the promise of change. You'd have to be daft not to feel it, the tension in the world. Particularly here, in the desert. It gives one the uncanny sense that there is weight to every moment.

He knows it must have started long before Maxence, this feeling of the rubber band stretching. He knows that their dreams, their lives, are just scratches in the great wheel that rolls on. And yet there seems something pivotal about that day the pied commander was swept away.

He steps out of the water, and the air is chilly against his wet skin. "You must have known him well? Champion?" There is something like laughter in his voice-- it borders on derision, although he does not mean to mock her. It fades and he asks, earnestly, "what was he really like?"

-     -     -
There is no better way to know us
E I K
than as two wolves, come separately to a wood

@Bexley