Art by Neverr ♥

but somewhere here in between the city walls of dyin' dreams

He was thin. The white of his coat was matted, dull, and where it fell into the hollows of his hips and ribs, dark shadows. He moved with the slow caution of someone in pain, or simply tired beyond all measure; putting one hoof in front of the other, shifting his weight and grunting when it braced against his aching joints and thin muscle.

It should've been a miracle that he walked at all—truly, a miracle that he simply lived, but he was cheating. He was cheating pretty badly, actually, because each time he slammed headfirst into the doors of death, it was like the Moon had either told them to not let him in, or had put a safeguard in place that started to haul him back up to the surface and patch him back together each time he came too close. He didn't know which. Both, maybe.

He fell into the category of those who slit their throat while yelling for help.

Only for him, it would never be too late, because he couldn't die and it was both relieving and kind of embarrassing and really, really inconvenient.

Not to mention it made him perfectly able to pull the kind of stunts he'd been pulling since it happened. Not fighting hard enough. He gritted his teeth, as much against the thoughts as against the pain lancing through him. What would he have done, if he'd washed up on the shore decades later? When everyone he had known and loved had been gone?

He would've hated himself (old news, because he's already doing that), but what was worse, he would regret it, for forever. It'd haunt him at night, the knowledge that if he'd just fought a little harder, he could've come back, and it wouldn't have been too late. (If he hadn't been so selfish.)

Mauja sighed. The white mist curled out from his nose. He was hugging the treeline by the sheer drop from the cliff, because so close to the wetness of the sea, the fog still hung here.

Things were changing, and it sent the wrong kind of shivers up his spine.

He'd been there when the Moon Goddess pulled back, her presence like a brief, searing burn across his heart, but he hadn't made himself known. Had simply faded back into the mist, after seeing one of his unlikely saviors, some strangers, and Mirage's dragon-kid. He couldn't remember name anymore, but her father was Vikram, the bastard who had tried to burn him in an invasion a long, long time ago. He'd broken the kid's spirit during the leader auditions he'd accidentally won. He'd only been there because Kahlua was.

He really needed to stop losing the people he cared about, but if he started blaming himself for their deaths and departures, he was pretty sure not even immortality could save him.

So someone, a he, had been lying. From what Mauja had gathered, it was that weird creature who had made them clean up a beach—the weird someone who had rubbed him the wrong way. He'd felt all wrong and it turned out that maybe, he was.

Mauja limped slowly among the hardy, wind-whipped trees. Their bark was encrusted with salt spray from the storm waves and constant wind. It was the closest thing to home he had, because he'd chosen to forsake his land of birth. He could go there. He knew that he could.

He also knew that going there meant becoming someone else. The Mauja they knew wasn't the Mauja he was.

He gritted his teeth. Limped on. On his back, the pitiful owls shifted in their healing sleep. He had a feeling things were changing, that it would come soon, and that it wasn't good at all.

Well, fuck. It wasn't like he had any choice but to live through it.

He limped on.