 Where are you from, Kostya?
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I followed the faint smell of salt west from Thistle Meadow as though I had made the journey a hundred times before, head low and gait almost mechanically smooth in timeless migratory fashion. This was not new to me; blocking out an entire new world rich with people to meet and strange things to see, however, probably was. When next I looked up, it was upon a wide stretch of golden sand with the uninterrupted blue of ocean beyond.
It wasn’t home – not even close – but there is something about the sea that welcomes you all the same.
Perhaps I was a bit homesick after meeting Ranjiri, but I’d never belonged on the lost islands any more than I’d belonged in the foothills of Delphi or the jungles of Ferraden. Curious might have been a better word, then. What had become of Nascha and Naira, of Dante, and all those others that had wandered out of our lives as easily as they had wandered in? What had become of our parents? Had they surrendered to the ocean’s icy embrace like their fathers before them?
I supposed they hadn’t; some people say you would feel that sort of thing, or whatever. I didn’t feel any more like an orphan now than I had on the night of my birth.
Wandering this new beach, I find my thoughts drifting toward the not quite so distant past: toward angels and demons and the rotted out skeletons of vanquished civilizations. I had never fancied Nocturne as a place to settle. It was a place to catch our breath, to rest travel-weary hooves, and then I knew we would leave just as we had.
I had not expected us to leave again with company, or with baggage.
But that’s life, isn’t it?
 It was a strange sort of peace that let me wander.
Not very far and not for very long, but still – this place felt… tranquil. Quite unlike Nocturne, quite unlike the islands where I was ever so busy, and very much so unlike Delphi in its stagnant state, but nonetheless, I imagined I could be… calm, here. At ease, perhaps; enough that I was confident enough to wander north, ever north, until the very ends of the steppes, just to double back again.
Sometimes it felt like at every land we met, wherever we sent camp, I reimagined myself. The basics were the same – protect him, love him, follow him to the bitter end – but the details, ah, they do say the devil is in the details, no?
Mayhap I was little more than a mess of poorly thought out details.
It was under such thoughts (remarkably less introspective than they sound) that I found myself by the beach. Quite unusual, because last I knew, I’d been wandering through tundra, but then, these things happen. One day you’re in a jungle, strangled to death in heat and wet and rot, the next you’re drifting through ice-cold waters. No big deal.
Funnily, there was no flashback, no sudden slap of recognition and nostalgia; I hardly cared for my past as an island prince (remarkably lacking in thorn crowns, silk sarongs and tribal paintings – where do these images even come from, anyway?), though I enjoyed it nonetheless.
He did look good against the gold and blue background, though, with the wind in his mane as it was. Sea wind has such a peculiar tang, a taste, almost, that begins in your nose and ends in your bones. It’s a curious thing.
I suppose admiring him in the sun, fire and water, earth and air, light and darkness, my beloved doppelgänger – I suppose that made a narcissistic bastard of me.
Not that I cared. It was true, anyway.
People often speak of twins possessing inexplicable magical gifts – telepathy, empathy, whatever you like to call it – that link them across distances and keep them always in touch with one another. After such intimacy in the womb, one might reason, how could two creatures ever completely be separated?
Yeah. I had nothing like that.
Sasha watched from afar as my mind led me through a labyrinth of its own construction, each room a face from my past. The last of them loomed familiar and red in my mind’s eye, his gaze heavy with the weight of a closely-guarded past. ’ I happen to be good at finding my way back,’ he said silently in my head as he had done countless times since that distant dawn. It was then that the wind shifted along the shoreline, playing through my hair, and startled by the change I looked up and around myself at last.
My brother stood rather...proudly nearby, his gaze fixed upon me with singular intensity, and my expression erupted into a grin.
In my eagerness to drink in the newness of Helovia, I might have accidentally left him behind somewhere. I ought to have felt guilty, but of course he could take far better care of himself than I ever could, and he rarely worried about my tendency to stray. If we needed each other, we tended to know where to look.
Except....
No, I would not speak of it.
“Sashulya!” I called, accentuating the word with an enthusiastic flick of my head. “Mne nravitsya ehto mesto.”
I didn’t reply; I just smiled, and nodded. Of course he did. It was obvious in his face, if nothing else – quite unlike our previous haunt, this one promised to be… calmer, if not necessarily better, more relaxing, perhaps.
If it wasn’t for him, that language of our ancestors would’ve faded away –it escaped me sometimes; I’d begin thinking in one and end in another, seamlessly. It mingled not well with the other languages we’d learned in our life (some verbal, most not).
I’d learned to favor silence, perhaps because he’d learned otherwise. In the end, we always balanced each other, some way or another (almost always to me detriment, but that never bothered me before, or after).
I trailed the edges of the sea so it lapped at my feet. It was soothing; a brief memory of those days in our beach bubbled and popped soundlessly across my brain. Memory was truly not my forte, but it needed not be, he remembered well enough for both of us.
“Horosho,” I said at last, humming mostly to myself – it happened more often than I would like. I wasn’t about to lie and say that I did as well (because, warm and pleasant as the sea was, I didn’t care either way), but that he was happy made me happy and that was enough. And maybe I was in complete denial and not running to his side like a pathetic overeager puppy in a pointless attempt to establish my independence in face of overwhelming odds, which was irrelevant since I had not an independent thought to spare, but whatever. Legs do as they will, I guess.
“Ty escho podruzhilsya s kem-nibud?”
I did not even know why I bothered to ask.
My laughter precluded any real need to answer my brother’s question as I fell easily into step with him along the tide line. “Konechno.” It was as much a part of me as it wasn’t a part of Sasha (which, strictly speaking, seems to be the norm with the pair of us).
He had gone different directions than I in the brief time we’d spent apart. I could smell the telltale scents of colder climes tangled into his hair, along with a whiff of something that I found more surprising than unfamiliar. We had left Nocturne in a hurry, and there had been three of us: wiping out our tracks with the last of the power binding us to that forsaken place had not exactly occurred to any of us, and for the most part I did not mind if we had accidentally been followed.
He needed friends too.
One ear turned slightly sideways, hint enough at a frown that hadn’t the decency to form upon my lips. I was so much a creature of the present, but memory has a way of never letting you let go of the past. Billy Pilgrim’s apparent immortality did nothing to spare him from the unsavory remembrances of war.
As my laughter trailed off, the silence deepened abruptly.
“Sdelali my pravil’no? My ostavili vseh drugih.”
He would know who I really meant. He would know how I felt; but did I?
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