azrael
When she begrudgingly agrees to let him bandage her wounds, Azrael does so with practiced efficiency and does not waste any time. He applies the salve on her leg, doing his best to be gentle, before wrapping it tightly with a clean piece of gauze from his satchel. “That should help.” He quickly inspects his work, tucking the remainder of the salve into a small vial and passing it to the mare. “You can use the rest of it when you change the bandage… it should stave off infection, but try to keep the wound dry.”
Are you a shed star? she asks, and he nods with an edge of curiosity. “I am… have you met many shed stars?” For all of them were different, Azrael far kinder than most. There were those who were far more pious than he, too proud to leave their mountain home. Others he saw as swindlers – merchants and entertainers, more interested in a bit of coin than in serving their goddess. But then there are the star-gazers like himself, always looking skyward for their prayers and answers. In the stars, he would always find his comfort and his way. In the stars, he found his home.
She suggests that he should not wander here, and a part of him agrees… for the island had been far from kind to him. It had shown him many a fateful thing, had twisted his understanding of reality through its magic. But there is a curiosity in him which cannot be quelled, and Azrael had come to find the island an interesting sort of place. It was a world which could not be understood, and this wonder was enough to counterweigh the risk. Even the island’s appearance now, he knew, was more than just a place of desolation. There had to be more, behind the emptiness and still. He yearned to know what secrets Tempus had hidden in this realm.
“Your daughter is missing?” The shed-star’s focus shifts back to the now, seeing a hint of worry in the haughty mare’s eyes. It is enough to pique his curiosity, and to stir in him memories of his own child… for if Elli was missing, Azrael would move heaven and earth to find her. A mother’s love was even stronger, he mused. “Let me help…”
He does not suggest that her wounds would slow her down, but instead he agrees to help in the search as a fellow parent, one who understood the fear in the mother’s eyes. “What makes you think she would come to a place like this?”
@Morrighan
