He hadn't exactly avoided the beach—he just hadn't found the time, nor the energy, to go there. He had spent the past season running from himself, and the season before that in the cold, heavy grasp of his own mind. He had struggled with apathy, he had struggled with listlessness, with hopelessness and defeat; and then, he had struggled with the sharp breaks in his mind, and the pit of darkness which had suddenly opened beneath him as he had demanded to be killed—

As his long legs carried him along the ocean's mouth his brain re-painted the picture of that disastrous herd meeting; the shadows ran black and red with envy as the wild-eyed, white wraith stood before his King. His heart demanded love while his mouth demanded violence.

But all he had got was a single, red drop stolen from his veins, to spiral slowly down a thick, black horn as he was refused.

His plea for violence—but not the love nestled in it. Tembovu just hadn't understood in that moment. He hadn't—well, who ever could? Who could ever comprehend the stark raving mad depths of his icy soul? Who could ever understand the torment he wrought upon himself, when not even he did? When he was so confused that comfort and death-dealing violence got tangled up? When he asked for death instead of an embrace, when he said I love you instead of explaining anything?

He shook his great white head, long, silken mane flying about his sweat-soaked neck. A bright noon sun beat down upon him, occasionally drowned out, or at least tempered, by puffs of white cloud, but not even together with the ocean breeze was it enough to keep him entirely cool. Still, it was a discomfort he could suffer, at least today, for as he ambled along he realized he had needed this, and badly. Something about moving, something about just walking and thinking, got his brain going in a way standing still never could. Things fell into patterns, came into clarity, and sometimes, he understood himself, what he had done, and why.

The sun lit the ridge of his nose as he turned to glance behind him, at the tall, white cliffs. Was there ever any understanding for what had transpired there? Of that—that day, when the midday sun had witnessed his immortality put to the test? His jaws clenched for a moment. The scars were healing, a black, hairless patch of finely knit new skin at the point of his chest, but—but what about them? Him and Tembovu? Would they ever heal..?

How could the Elephant King trust him, when he didn't even have enough sense to say no, stop, I don't want this?

When he couldn't even look out for himself?

I don't exist—he was starting to admit that he existed, but that he was worthless instead. At least, to himself. That was the only rational, logical explanation—that he, Mauja, Frosthjarta and Frostljós, did not matter, not in the great scheme of things. Not when compared to everyone else. He was the lowliest creature in existence, the shoulders upon which all else stood, nothing but a slave draped in fine, regal clothing—time and again, he destroyed himself for others, whether they asked it of him or not.

The owls veered overhead, casting fleeting shadows in the stark sunlight. Mauja paused mid-stride, glanced briefly at his own; it was bare, as he walked without both staff and bags today. Despite the distortion from the angle of the sun he saw the proud arch of his neck, and grimaced. Sometimes, he wished he had been a small, runty thing instead. Perhaps he wouldn't have become what he was, then, if he hadn't been somewhat imposing to look at.

But that wasn't the real reason he had stopped, and staring at his shadow had just been a convenient excuse to delay. Frosted hooves skimmed hot, silver sand until they met lap of ocean water. The bone-white sands had darkened to slate; he left dark prints in it, the jagged edges quickly smoothed out by the relentless motion of the water.

She lay there, like another piece of driftwood. The surf rushed up to kiss her body, to lift the white tendrils of her tail and push them towards shore, and then back out again. Striped flanks rose and fell with the steady rhythm of breathing—at least she was alive.

There was so much left unsaid. There were so many words upon his tongue, and so many thoughts within his mind (so much fear within his heart). He still didn't know her name—she was just a tiger-striped mare with star-sharp eyes, something pristine, something holy, something cold and sharp and deadly and wicked and soft and beautiful and warm—

"Are you alright?" he asked, gently, his voice just a breath next to the ocean.

[ @Maren ]

(The self-proclaimed martyr wanders—)

For where does one draw the line? Where does consideration and selflessness spill over into unasked-for sacrifices; when gratitude is expected? Mauja wasn't yet self-aware enough to know when he did what he did, much less why in that exact moment, but had he ever expected thanks..?

No.

He didn't think anyone knew what he was doing, in the shadows, and each time he asked himself: do you want to grow bitter and old and one day brandish this in the face of others, to justify your suffering and use it as leverage, decry 'if you only knew how I have suffered for you..'?

And that was the problem: no one had ever asked him to suffer for them. No one had ever wanted him to chip away at his own soul until it was nothing but a thin sliver of marrow and bone splinters left. He only had himself to blame, and there was nothing glorious about it.

What drove him to her? What magnetic pull, like the moon tugging on the ocean, brought him, time and again, to the side of those who appeared to be in need? (Had she lain broken and bleeding upon the shore, she wouldn't have been the first he had saved here—if he could save anyone.) Where was the Mauja that would've launched himself upon her, taken advantage of her repose to bury his horn deep in her beating heart, and let the sea wash away the stains of his sin..?

All that was left was a kind stranger, someone Mauja didn't know who it was, someone he hadn't bothered to get to know, and the tiger-mare's pale head rose to watch that particular stranger come closer. Her obvious lack of distress made him want to recoil, to pretend he hadn't been concerned, to leave and go on his way—let her be, spare her the foolishness of now-immortal men. One of these days, he really ought to learn patience. (The patience needed for complete isolation of the self.)

But part of him drove his jaws to part in defiance, pushed the words from his lungs and into the air between them.

The illusions shattered. For all that she seemed at times so ethereal, so mysterious, born from some vague, distant star and sent here on a secret holy quest—for all this, she remained painfully mortal at times, anchored deep in reality, in the white sand. She was no angelic dream; she was real, too, with her own heart, scars, dreams and wishes.

He felt guilty.

(She was no goddess who needed to be saved.)

Dark pessimism engulfed his mind, and he turned his head away from her star-sharp eyes and heaved a brief, bitter laugh—barely a laugh at all, but he thought it came from the same place within him, rattling up from his lungs. "In my experience," he began, still not looking at her, just seeing the little indent where the sand folded around her in the corner of his eye, "people lying in the shallows like that are usually half-dead, or more." His tail flicked, stark white in the sunlight, a harsh, unforgiving sound as it whipped against his haunch and flank. It was discordant, all of it; the dream-soft state of his mind came up sharply against the solid reality of the world, and he had a hard time reconciling them.

"I'm glad you're not, though," he added after a moment, soft, quiet, chancing a glance at her from his blue eyes while he wondered why he meant it; had he somehow devolved into caring about everyone in this fucking land?

[ @Maren <3 ]

What was it Skullface had called him all those years ago—Fallen? True it had been then, true it was now; true it had always been, and likely always would. It was fascinating how strangers saw to the core of him, how they saw the fine lattice of cracks across the milk white of his skin, but how he somehow tricked them into seeing grace and strength, too, where there was none.

He was broken, but still moving.

He was fallen, but all it seemed to give him was dark beauty.

The reflection cast back at him in the eyes of others was somehow warped, layered in their fantasies and expectations, anchored in reality but ultimately nothing but their dream of him.

And the darkest, bitterest truth he had to swallow was this: he was fallen because he had pushed himself off the edge.

She smiled at him—still cryptic, still angelic, mysterious, sharp—and her response was logical, laced with a kind of amusement that went like a knife between his ribs and into his heart. It twisted, and his heart stumbled, and the cautious glance given her way drifted away again as the same sense of stupid mortality descended upon him. What was it about her that made him feel so .. worthless and pathetic, like she was perfection and he nothing but a stumbling, fumbling, dumb insect crawling on the floor beneath her holy feet..?

A low sigh was blown from black nostrils as his head arced slowly towards the earth. Dumb dumb dumb dumb rang in his mind, rattling and discordant, bouncing from one end of his skull to the other—

Who would ever need you, Mauja?

And why do you need to be needed, dear old frozen heart?

(I thought you didn't have emotions. That you didn't feel affection. That you were nothing but a glacial wasteland. Pristine. Perfect. Machinery.)

“You must have been through a lot,” she said, and he blew at the silver sands, watched them ripple like the discomfort crawling down his spine in silence. Was she mocking him? Or was she pitying him?

I don't want your pity.

He didn't deserve pity; he had done all of this to himself. There was no bigger, greater, external force which had crippled his soul and haunted him—there was no glorious fight in which he had championed things good and bright, there was just an idiot who kept stabbing himself and wishing someone would see him bleed even as he did his best to wrap it up as quick as he could.

"Perhaps," he simply said to the sand, the scent of the ocean strong in his nostrils and he wondered what it would be like to wade into its arms, and let it take him into the deep. “— In this land… You must know a lot about it, too.” It reminded him of another time, a dreary and gray day, and a white woman-child asking him for the Edge's history.

He had given it. Freely. While his thread was woven thick in the tapestry of it, he had not needed to betray old trusts and reveal the darkness of his past; he had told it with as much detachment as he could, but more and more he could not deny that the generation he had come to Helovia with was leaving him behind. They moved on. Away. Died. Few remained; few remembered the Windtossed Foothills, the wrath of the sun god, the fall of the Order of the Sun...

Was it an invitation to talk? Or was it nothing but a statement?

He chose the latter, pitiful old fool that he was; if she wanted something from him, she would have to ask.

His soft nose skimmed the sand as he ambled closer; stood next to her and stared out over the white-foam backs of the waves. "Yes," he said, quietly, hating how she had phrased it: you must have been through a lot. You broken old thing. You fragile, shattered, unfortunate soul. He breathed out, head still slung low. The worst part wasn't what she said, or how she said, or anything that had anything to do with her.

The worst part was that he was weak.

Why else would he be in the position he was in?

[ @Maren ]

There it was again, that old twitch in his bones—run away, run away. The only way he had ever known to get rid of a problem, but he couldn't outpace his demons any longer. They were too many. Their haunting song followed him, their harsh cries giving him no respite; they were the sum of his regrets, of his lost chances, of closed doors and all the times his heart had broken. They yelled with all the fervor of his guilt, and a brittle promise to a now-dead daughter was all that held him in place. He had sworn to stop running, but what good was it, if he didn't know any other way to solve the problem?

His breath was hot in his chest, and sparks ran along the insides of his legs, demanding he pick up his hooves and run. It went like a twitch down his spine, a suffocating darkness welling up in the back of his throat—blind panic, because he didn't know what else to do.

She had died, and bled out, on sands, sands foreign, not silver like these, and one hoof gave in to the scream going along his nerves; it flicked up, then came down again. Grew still, as the rest of him, as he pulled back behind the ice shield. If he left now, he would hate himself for a coward, but if he stayed, what did he do but prove the point?

He didn't like his own misery staring him back in the eye.

He didn't like it laid out like a slit-throat corpse on a table covered in white satin, but that was what it was like; something about her brought out the worst, the most pitiful in him, and laid it bare for him to see. Every flaw, every crack, every dark, lost part of him that cried out for love but was smothered in ten thousand feet of snow and ice—

Confessions and confusions so deep he barely knew them himself.

What he craved was like a fire. Each time it came close, he shied back.

"You remind me of driftwood in still water."

Broken off, bleached bone-white by sun, coated by salt, once cast about by the fury of a storm and an ocean, but now nothing—like a beached whale, dying where it does not belong? Whatever she meant, it stung like salt in an open wound, and, subtly, his head shifted away. That part about her bringing out the most pitiful in him? Yeah.

(You won't get anywhere if you keep hiding the fact that you have a heart.)

But what was he supposed to do, show her just how pathetic he was, when something like an off-hand, cryptic comment hurt him? And besides, it wasn't her fault—she wasn't the one who had fucked him up. He was the one who had fucked himself up, and why should he blame her for grabbing him by the horn and forcing him to look at himself?

Had there even been a time when he had been able to do that, and not feel sick?

Praised by fire and coated in blood, had the elation been real? Or had it been nothing but a smoke screen to keep him from feeling sick at himself, and the hypocrisy? Was it cowardice, to be what he had been?

She stood up next to him, dripping sand and water, elegant, mysterious, a bastion of strength and light—confident, in a position of power. She gave nothing away as she baited him for his secrets, as she pried for ..something. She was the surgeon and the knife cold in her hands, and he felt so fucking thick—all she needed to do was twist the words around his mind and all of a sudden, she would've cut the secrets from his bones and that would've been the end of that.

The question, spoken as her eyes stared into his averted ones, caught him off guard. “Do you trust me?” Do you trust strangers? he wanted to reply, but guilt choked the words in his throat as he remembered, vaguely, the warmth of her body beneath his. “Why won’t you talk to me?” Do you think yourself the only one I won't talk to?

If he knew how to talk—if he knew how to pull the darkness from his heart and spit it out between his lips and not inhale it back down again—if he knew these things...

They should've called me Mauja the Bitter.
But they don't know anything about me.

"I don't even know how to," he said in the end, his eyes moving to the horizon without lingering on hers—afraid of what they might say, afraid of there being an unspoken promise if their gazes met.

[ @Maren ]