So this is his fate, now.

Knox has been running, the tears dripping from his face, to a place he might know. Here, as the night grows dark and the fires ahead serve as his beacon, he hopes he might find a release. He turns his face away from that bright flame. He is looking for someone he will not find.

Manhattan?

He is praying.

Manhattan, is that you?

He is at fault, and still he is seeking his friend--his sister.

I am not here. She is cold like the dead. Her heart is locked, her body and mind empty. Leave me 'lone, give me pity. Did you think you get away with murder, live life like dead-walker and still find love?

He doesn't know what to say. She continues, speech steady, sharp, barbed with a poisonous truth. The beacons of flame draw nearer.

Please, leave me be. Kill this bond and become someone else. Kill something for the right reason, do the right thing for once.

I was trying, he begs, he pleads. But it is no use; by the time he reaches Helovia's heart he had taken on an entirely different shape. Knox becomes Anaan, a white and blue glory rendered in burn-scars, and stands in eager wait for the one mare he knows in this world who still breathes beside him.

The breath of the grandfather, the protector, is heavy and labored from the run. He has come far from the scene of his descendant's crime, and now he stands tall and looking out. Will she come? He asks the black retriever as she catches up to him, slowing to a stop and pressing her face in his hocks. She seems upset and he doesn't fully know why; this is not his bond, not his set of emotions to peer into. He feels her tongue against the tissue lining a scar. Anaan is comforted, Anaan is quieted, Anaan is patient. The long, clean silk of his mane catches in the wind and he stares, wide-eyed, at the fires in the distance. He will be glad to escape the threat of their glow. Those orange shadows are not reminders he needs, not now.

He has been thinking, quiet and to himself, for so long now about this meeting. He has watched through younger and older eyes, both, as the wind has chilled and the sky had filled with the white of frostfall's flurries and storms. Anaan has slowly been urging the body back here, slowly hoping he might be granted the gift of returning. He only hopes he is not too late, and that the strange mare, the badger face, the beauty, and her white companion will not have abandoned this site for good.

Whether they have, or whether they have not, he will wait. For as long as he can, for as long as this body and the mind now imprisoned within it allow him, he will wait for her.

[[Essetia]]
""