I listened as he spoke, but the tension in his voice was something that caught me rather off guard. I wasn’t expecting him to be so harsh and perhaps he wasn’t really all that harsh to begin with. Perhaps the throbbing pain in my head caused me to think he was being something darker than he typically was? I hoped that was the case, I didn’t want him to be upset with me. I didn’t need him to be upset with me over something I could so easily be upset with him about as well.

I noticed the little gashes on his knees from colliding with the sand and just nodded to him, offering him a smile. “Of course you would be… Not to worry you or anything, but I do love my fair share of adrenaline rushes.” I paused for a moment, ears flickering back and forth with the pressure of speaking that caused my head to pound with pain. Then he spoke again and the tone stayed the same, asking me about if I felt anything else other than the cough. Yeah, I did feel other things. I felt the slight tickle as the sludge slipped from my nose and lips, I felt the trickle of blood that began to seep from my ivory ears, I felt the pressure behind my eyes and the pressure that lined my lungs and just how uncomfortable that array of things seemed to be. I just shrugged to him, unsure of what to say. I didn’t need to worry him more but I did feel more things than just a simple ‘cough’. “Just the cough and this headache.” I said softly. The smile fading from my lips as he snorted to me.

‘if you had just joined me at the Edge, Rexanna, you could have avoided one of these sicknesses.’ I heard him say before shaking my head slightly. Frustration flaring in my chest but I did my best to keep calm. The worst thing for this headache and lung slime was to speak too much and run out of breath with a chance of being unable to get the air back. Shaking my head to him, I smiled to him – genuinely. “Tembovu, my love, I have avoided one of these sicknesses.” I turned my head to glance around to the crowd that surrounded the crocodile still. Taking note that some of these creatures still had the boils that I had encountered at the beginning of the Labyrinth fight. I remembered seeing that pale child with them, looking painfully intense as she stepped. I had encountered many with that disease that Erthe had told me came from the Blood Falls, a place I had not seen yet. And alas, I hadn’t succumbed to them. I figured that was due to my land, like the Labyrinth being Temb’s protection.

“I encountered many with boils, Temb, and I never contracted it. I’m sure the results are the same from the Goddess at the Labyrinth. I remember Mauja speaking of the Moon when we met you. About how she’s the goddess of the Edge? The God for the Basin is the God of Spark, right? I wasn’t at the Blood Falls fight, but I want to assume that the God of Spark was there – otherwise my theories are entirely off.” I said softly to him with a bit of a shrug, sure that he would answer me when he felt like he needed to. My huge speech had been broken and dragged out over a few minutes as I paused to catch my breath from the full feeling of phlegm like mucus that blocked my throat every so often.

"Talk?"

rexanna

And from the minute that the line got drawn,
I couldn't see straight to you for nothing.