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It comes suddenly on a breath of wind through the little meadow nestled atop mountains that you had discovered while searching for flowers and roots, comes different from the sharpness of the alpine smell, pulls your attention from your meager collections. The sound of pounding steps follows quickly after, and you press yourself closer to the trunk of the nearest tree, watching as a dark man begins to poke above the slope of the trail with a deer in tow.
You watch as he comes to a stop, listen to the frustration of his breaths as he spins and is greeted with the impassable peaks of the cliffs. The (assumed) remoteness of this place had drawn you to it, lended you a feeling of safety, of solitude, but now as your eyes follow his, your heart thrums uncomfortably within your chest, and only now do you realize that there is only one route of escape. He turns then, towards your trees and his anger washes through you, over you, your body trembling weakly against it as now your entire chest throbs with a twisting pain.
It had been the same when you had been cornered by an angry man with intentions black as sin, and you feel it as the warmth trickles from your blood, the instinct to run even with nowhere to go pressing against the back of your skull, through to the marrow of your bones. It is the shifting of light or perhaps a pinprick of clarity within your rising fear then that breathes vague familiarity into his features, releases you from the grips of panic.
Your sense of relief blurs the thoughts of danger into something altogether different, though just as potent, just as volitile as it punctures through memory.
Rikyn.
He had left, shed the winter like a skin and sank into wilderness. It had never bothered you until the boy with ocean eyes, a heart filled with promises of better times, with memories of the friends he had lost and those who have abandoned him mentioned black and gold and you remembered his face and the way he smiled when he had looked at you, the insipid child that had practically turned green when she had seen it too. His scarcity had hardly been noticed until you knew that he had left him, too. It had angered you to learn that he could just leave, without reason as far as you understood when Erebos still cherished the friendship shared between them, because you hurt for his hurt, buried beneath all those smiles and wild ways.
But now that you still watch him from your place among the pine, your lips pressed thin, you find that there is no room for it. No room for the protective shield you wear, for the bitterness you have clutched to because you knew Erebos wouldn't, and someone should. His heaving form only begs the questions why—why he had left him, left the Basin and hadn't come back, if he had ever bothered to pull Erebos from the memories he had left him in.
It has never been your place, never your relationship to fix or mediate, and so you sigh quietly, leaving your questions at that as you pull from the trees, the thought of him not recognizing you not even crossing your mind when the line of your mouth twists into something more playful, more obliging to your hope of curiosity, an inkling of interest, a thought of wickedness that you have no doubt that he at least once possessed in the days he grew so close with your lionheart.
"I heard something about you."
Heard a glimpse of a childhood you know so little about despite your own bonds with the boy who had mentioned him, striking a chord of distant familiarity among a story of sadness and destruction, of things that he cherished still that seemed to have forgotten him and everything that used to be.
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[P] sooner or later God will cut you down
