[P] daybreak

[Eik]

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I DO NOT BELIEVE THINGS ARE REBORN IN FIRE
I BELIEVE THEY'RE CONSUMED BY FIRE
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She looks at him and he looks at her and it suddenly strikes him as funny. The circles they churn, the dust motes illuminated in the evening light, him watching her watching him, the nervous acceptance, all of it-- funny. Flawed and yet good, almost perfect, the way life so often is. And all this despite the loss, the pain, the madness-- or because of it? He does not laugh but he feels feather-light for a moment.

And like a feather he falls, or rather drifts, back down into himself, his machine of a body, and his mind returns to the moment, and the future and past as they relate to the matter at hand, and he forgets for a moment all other things.

Diplomacy is a foreign thing to him, yet it doesn't seem so difficult here. Back home, or rather what was once home, there was no such thing as diplomacy, no reasoning to be had with the warmongering tribes. No such thing as peace unless you claimed it for yourself, in the refuge of your mind or the solace of worship.

He wonders suddenly if that place was hell, or purgatory- it all seems so insane to him now.

He had not expected this vocation to include so much traveling, and he feels a little lighter with this information. And reading and writing, while not his strengths they are his newfound interests; he needs no encouragement to develop those skills. What he does wonder is how to apply his (admittedly directionless) wandering. He is naturally curious about how others live and think, but that doesn't seem as useful to an emissary- he supposes now his interests will have to be funneled more toward learning more about the courts themselves and the way they are run. Similarly he will have to represent something bigger than himself, and his idea of that bigger thing will need some refinement.

He thinks, and thinks, comfortable in knowing that she is at least a bit familiar with the way his mind works. The long silence and the flood of questions that follow. "What are your goals as sovereign?" He asks. "How do you see our relationships with the other courts, and how would you like them to be?" He assumes relations with the night court are still rocky, but the other courts are a small mystery. He has not had any hostile encounters with dawn or dusk (on the contrary, they've been nothing short of pleasant) but that was on an individual level, and Eik does not tend to provoke the nastier sides of people.

Of course, he will later kick himself for turning his attentions immediately to the other courts. Travel has grabbed his attention and run off with it.

"Do I take anyone with me?" He is accustomed to traveling alone, prefers it really, but can see the value in having another set or two of eyes and ears. "Or any thing? Gifts?" His people had traded in words, and it was custom to pay for hospitality with stories. But he'd never been a gifted storyteller, not even in his mother tongue- he never put enough feeling into his tales, and was never generous with detail. His imagination was always far larger than he had the words to express and so he slowly stopped trying. But the customs in Novus are different, and there are far more valuable things than words. For example, that honeyed mead he had in Dusk. He'd take a bottle of that over a story, any time.

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AND THE FIRE HAS A LIFE OF ITS OWN
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@Seraphina good lord I keep spelling it emisarry lol, thank u spell check