Kendall’s question of constellations fell on deaf ears as Seven broke into strides as wide as his legs would take him across the sand, nearly stumbling over stray lines of driftwood and sand that had been kicked up by horses that had long since cantered through it. “Good at it?” Seven turned his head over his shoulder to call back at the man that took chase, “I wouldn’t say that!” Symenestra were a graceful community, adept at climbing and traversing impossibly thin strands of silk in their cavernous city. Seven, on the other hand, was not. A stray mass of driftwood caught him along his left ankle as his attention was turned towards Kendall and he skidded and fell to the ground in a glorious heap of white linen and bony elbows.
With a grunt, he flipped himself over onto his back and shook sand from his chest and knees. Seven could feel the burn of a well-timed blush spread across his cheeks as he realized how ridiculous he must have looked to the Azenth. “Oh, dear.” That was all he managed to utter before laughter bubbled up in his throat and he allowed his aching muscles respite, laying flat against the sand. Laughter turned to outright giggling and as his head rolled sideways towards the Suvan, he noticed a familiar green shape an arm’s length away. “Ah!” The giggling was stifled in favor of a moment of clarity.
A thin arm – elbow aching from taking the brunt of his impact moments before - snatched outward for the neck of the bottle and hauled it from its bed in the sand. Seven’s opposite arm pressed against the earth to heave his small trunk upright again and his knees bent and legs curled beneath him as he lifted the bottle into the air triumphantly.
“Looks like I won.”
There would be no more dwelling on the past in the halfblood’s presence. Neither of them needed to go down that road again; not while they spent their last few moments between the sand and sea together, emptying the bottle of apple wine between two pairs of eager lips, leaning in to one another to twitter like a pair of Zeltivan school girls and revel in the blackness of night. And as the past was forgotten; so were the chimes that slipped past one by one: time could have frozen there, just on that small spot where two young men sat drunk on the seaside and neither would have known the difference.