He was making his way back to the Throat and Ranjiri.
 
Though he had never crossed the sea to the island that floated beyond, he still considered the beach on which he camped to be as well a part of the realm across the waters as any – though it lacked the sense of safety that surely was present on a water locked land mass.  He found, however, that he didn’t care much for his safety at the end of the day, a true believer in faith and fate; if he was meant to die, a thousand armies could not defend him from the reaper of souls, and so he worried very little of defenses.
 
After all, what had the wall done for the Edge, other than trap them within when the wraiths came?  At the end of that tale, the things which they had sought to defend themselves with had been their undoing – and so are other tales he has heard, such as a man falling on his own weaponry, or a dame so deceived by the powerful heft of her armor across her shoulders that she challenged a foe to whom armor was like glass, like sand.
 
Thus, his thoughts were a circle:  the sand leading him back to the visage of the desert across the water, and the warm smile of his Ranjiri.
 
For the first time since coming to Helovia, the man feels the hole that the loss of his home had left within him mending – and while its edges were still itchy, the emotional wound no longer throbbed whenever thoughts of the lost land came to mind.  He found, as with all things, that the hurt grew less and less, the more things to be happy for you layered on top of it.
 
Still, happiness was elusive for the painted boy – it fluttered like butterflies, occasionally alighting upon him, but mostly just flickering out of his reach.  It often left him feeling like he was encased in a glass bauble, so like those he had made for Sheba, the delight and laughter of those around him muddled by the density of the silica which held him prisoner in the cool depths of his thoughts.  And, while he did not always dislike this aspect of being Dragomir, because it allowed him to think thoughts that often escaped those who drifted on the high winds of emotional delight, he just as often looked out of his prison and wondered…
 
Why can’t that be me?
 
So then would flood the images of his family, so far across the lands of Loorien.  So then would come the images of Shadow, of the imagined realm of Isilme, of the family he would never know and the family he had come to love and lost, here in Helovia:  so comes thoughts of all the things in his life that had been stolen, tainted, or oblique, and again would rise up that deep ache in his oceanic heart.
 
It was as his father said – his mother’s son.