Knox, too, suffers from the sickness called loyalty. It wears at his bones until they are brittle, eats away at his mind like a parasite. Each passing day makes him more addled, more lost. He wears his ancestors' flesh but doesn't remember, not really, if it is he that wears their ghosts or they that borrow his mind. It's too long ago, too late now. It doesn't much matter, does it?

His son is a disappointment, or maybe he is. Knox walks through the woods, in his father's younger body, and forgets where he is. Where he was born, or where he died? No, Roanne died. But why isn't he Roanne? Shouldn't he be? He finds himself trying to shapeshift, calling upon Roanne's long dead magic. He wants to fly into the trees, to leap down from them as a creature he no longer can be. Knox's neck extends and arches, and he lets out a cry in his father's voice. He expects it to sound like everything, animals put together in one body but suffering all as one, and it only sounds like the bitter echo of his own failure.

These are the days of again, of growing old. Was he great once, or could he simply have been? Potential does not equal actuality, grace differs from aging. Knox doesn't quite believe that anyone ages well. After all, look at his brother? Just as Knox is dumbed down by his loyalty to Archibald, doesn't the Dauntless bear the weight of a lost love?

No, Knox at least does not let these things hurt him. Aylin is gone but he will not cry, never again. Milo is broken but he will not say it is his fault, even if it is. He will be contentedly callous, and he will live this way for as long as the world lets him.

The sight of Ktulu in the near distance, the sound of her complaint, does not trigger what it should in him. Knox walks forward without thought, failing to check his memory for whether or not this mare knows him or Roanne, or anything at all. Just before coming into her plane of vision, though, he shifts back into his own form. No, surely she doesn't know him, and if she did once he can't believe that she'll remember him. No one really does, anymore, and he likes it that way.

"Time is cruel," Knox says from the dark, not addressing her for he would not expect the Constrictor to address him. Oh yes, he knows her. He knows her from the days of the Grey, when she ruled alongside Ophelia and the Falls stood for honor. But grace and aging cannot coexist. Even herds and worlds falter at the edge of time.


""