.svg/2000px-Google_Chrome_icon_(2011).svg.png){kind=icon}
03-04-2017, 02:47 PM
|
Rikyn
I don’t open like she does, I decide, watching her, at first, as she pulls into herself, tightening, like a night blooming flower in sight of the Sun. Eventually, though, all that heaviness seems to slowly chip and flake away from her, her tears a steady trek down her face that she ignores, or does not notice, and when she sobs, I gently reach out to touch her shoulder. Pulling away when she starts to speak, numbly taking in the emotional display and revelation of my friend’s recently passed months.
The Wildfire, dead? My head lifts with my ears, eyes widening with surprise, having not heard the news that the greatest foe I would likely ever face down, had fallen at last to the mortality that binds us all. The loss of my potential revenge stings, but I have gained enough societal goodness in the past year to step out of my initial, selfish impulses to be angry at fate, to tend to Sikeax, alongside me. Duir’s heart pulls and throbs with sympathy, and I suppose mine does too, in ways. In others, hearing her speak openly of feelings and failures, I am envious, and cold. There is weakness so clearly marked upon her as she weeps and moans, a frailty that, early in my life, I had been taught to keep hidden beneath layers of stone, and ice. As I’d grown, however, I had begun to learn that trapping everything you felt under the mountain slowly turned you into a volcano, but knowing and being are two very different things. Ryn, she says, making my heart do that hard pull, cold and hot back flip it always does when something lances through all my armor and finds me, shivering in the dark. It’s easy to forget how others knew you when you were small and golden, at least until they use one word to remind you that, once, there had been a time when you might have held her close to your breast, full of nurturing warmth, but that all you can do now is mutely listen, and stare. The comfortable distance between us is what I know now, and as she speaks of death, of being unable to stall its charge, I can empathize with her, how it is to feel powerless to the will of existence. Again, I touch her, a simple, swift gesture of cocoa lips to the curve of her defeated, bowed neck. It is a gesture which recoils away as her sorrow, and self blame, evolves into anger, my ears falling back and eyes narrowing with surprise and an anger of my own. I know Volterra, but that doesn’t matter, considering the amount of offense I take towards those the buttermilk mare had called herd-mates, on behalf of she, and Gaucho alike. Though I have tried to simply listen, to wait until all is said to say what must be said, the laughable insinuation that Sikeax had killed Gaucho draws a bark of cold, mocking disdain from my mouth, directed at whichever idiot had claimed it. "Only Death or a God could have beaten such a man," I state, bluntly, recalling all too well the impotent, useless sensation of being thrust out across the red sand with a single blow; I’d given everything I had, and he’d defeated me with ease. I remember his fire, and gesture to the scars still smattered along my side, where he’d left them with his infernal beasts. It was a dishonor to his memory to accuse any one as gentle as Sia of slaying him, and it was a disrespect to me, or any other warrior who had ever faced him, and met defeat. Regardless, as she finishes her story, I’m left with the oddly humble thought that, maybe, I’d left home impetuously, and for very little reason at all. While, certainly, being an outcast had been fun, maybe that was the only good excuse I really had. "Helovia is a chaotic place," I say, after some time, "everyone thinks they are better suited to rule this or that. If life was a game board, Helovia’s pieces would never seem to stop shuffling, but for the very few, who know their place. The sort of game that doesn’t have many rules, and that no one really seems to understand, even though some of us pretend to." "I would leave those people, if I was you. And I think that one of the few rules there is to this game, is to do what you want," I smile at her, "and what you think is right. Regardless, I’d have been proud to call you my Sultana, if I would ever want to live somewhere so awfully dry and hot." I laugh, suddenly struck by a humorous thought. "Maybe that’s why they’re all so awful, you know?" I grin, with a chuckle, "they’ve got sand in horrible places and can’t find water anywhere to rinse it out." The conversation turns to companions, Duir listening with his ears lifted and with interest, having not really had the opportunity to hear others talk of bonding before, being the basics of how and when. That Sikeax views her Hobgoblin as a child is very akin to what I feel for my buck, I myself having no actual offspring; raising a fawn is as much like having a foal as I can imagine, and, though we bicker, and sometimes seem as if we might regret having found one another, there is also a vast wealth of love. She meets my eyes, her question intriguing, because I’ve never asked myself. To be perfectly honest, I guess I sort of do, in ways, but he does me too, in others; I’m also deeply resentful of authority of any kind, and seek to dominate those around me, no matter who they are. It would make sense that I would have an equally arrogant companion, right? "I try to control everything," I answer honestly; I mean, it’s an integral part of my being, down to the very magics I wield, but its not necessarily a bad aspect of myself, either. A lot of good can come from someone who naturally accepts responsibility, seeing it as a gain of power. Of course, bad can, too, especially when that someone is me, entirely ill suited to the concept of being truly in charge of what becomes of those around them. "For myself. Duir seeks to change everything, for the sake of... Honor? Goodness? In that regard, I guess we both seek to control the other, in our own way, as I often choose to live my life in ways that he finds disdain for." "You can’t actually own anyone though," I adamantly conclude, because, well, you can’t. The only person you really own is yourself, and, some days, you can get away with owning absolutely no one at all, but you never got to dictate every action that someone else would take, even if you bent all your will to that one objective. It was simply too much, too hard; it was difficult to be yourself, let alone anyone else for an extended period.  |
@Sikeax
