spring 13th, 517 a.v.before sunrise
The night of Alvadas was quiet, in its own twisted way. In the solid confines of the Unstables, even the silence felt untrue; the city around him shifted and breathed like an animal, cunning as a raven and malicious as a viper. When he listened and felt around him, though, all was calm and still as it should be, as it had to be––of course a city didn’t move, of course stones and bricks didn’t pick themselves up and walk around overnight.
But they did, when he wasn’t looking or listening. He could feel it in his bones, through that bright, beautiful, agonizing rope that drove him and healed him and punished him. The rope shivered and tangled with the moving of the city, forcing him move with it; no matter the time of night, he would wake, realize what was wrong, and then toss and turn until he was facing east again. He couldn’t sleep unless he was facing the east.
Sometimes, before sleep took him, he would wonder if she fell asleep facing the west. He knew that she was safe and well––as much as either of them could be––and he wondered what that meant for the others. In that warm place between awake and not, he could almost fool himself into seeing golden eyes.
It was one of the bad nights. Alvadas seemed restless, shuffling around its bed like a fussy child that had decided that if it couldn’t sleep, no one else should be able to either. Colt woke up for the fifth time to find that east had shifted yet again. He didn’t know how close it was to dawn, but he knew that it was likely pointless to attempt more sleep. Frustrated and defeated, he resigned himself to an early morning and rolled out of his pile of hay.
He hadn’t meant to sleep at the stables, or the “Unstables,” as people liked to say with a snicker, but no one seemed to mind. From the quick, lyrical words of the Alvads around him, there seemed to be some sort of joke about him and working there, but it didn’t seem the sort of thing he needed to pay attention to––especially not at the end of the night, when he seemed to be the only real person out and about as he climbed down from the hayloft to go for a walk.
His definition of “real person” didn’t include the shadows that lived merrily in the corner of his eye, twitching and laughing at him right up to the moment he turned to look, only to find that there was nothing.
He was coming to hate Alvadas.
Moonlight was weak when he stepped into the open, with Leth almost to the western horizon. There was no gray light in the east quite yet, which left everything irritatingly dark. After a final glance around to make sure that he was alone, Colt pulled on the magic in his eyes and blinked forcefully to keep his vision clear.
Obediently, the ground before him began to glow. Thin ropes of light materialized for him to see, weaving over the ground in loose patterns left by the previous day’s activity. They were vague and uneven, but he was beginning to see differences; some were large and heavy, others so small they were like spidersilk, some with dull colors and others nearly blinding in their strength. It was clear that, in some way, different creatures lay down different trails; not all of them could be people, nor horse, nor vermin. As much as the magic of pathfinding revealed to him, there was still such a vast well of knowledge he had yet to even comprehend, much less explore.
But he didn’t need to comprehend tonight, not when the city rustled and his heart ached worse than usual. All he wanted was something to dwell on, something real and tangible and not in the east.
And he was Drykas, after all. He was already in the place he needed to be.
