There was a dark gleam that came to Caelum's eyes, tarnished gold like distant suns, when Eida mentioned the Forsaken and wrapped the word in that tone. Her questions at the beginning he knew to be rhetorical. They were not desperate seekers of answers such as his, but rather tortured, lonely cries flung into an empty night, hoping to relieve some of the solitude by lingering in the ears of a brother. That brother, of course, being him. It appeared that Eida was satisfied with whatever answers she had housed within her since her own fall and he wished her nothing but comfort and ease with them.
He, however, had always been forged for a different story.
Caelum had not so much crawled out of the water as he had hit the ground running. He had fled through the fog of ghosts that occupied Dira's own isle and torn across the world, at once chased and chasing. He hunted up the remedies for a world ruined by a cataclysm, attempted to chart the cures for heartaches and soul scars like stars in a navigator's map, and hunted the very same answers he was hunted by himself. He used to be terrified of some truths, though he failed to balk at sussing them out. He would weep at the feet of the goddesses who eventually came to him, but in the next breath spit out mouthfuls of hungry demands.
And not so very long ago in a city far, far north from here, he had slipped that last desperate inch off the edge of hope and fallen right into the heart of his personal night. He had become Forsaken in Ravok, caught in the web of an unspeakable language, tossed off course by an agent of Ivak and a lover of Rhysol. It had taken him years, years past even his eventual escape of their shadow, to ascend quite on accident back into the state of Syna's grace that Eida met him at now. The colors of him were no longer frozen, but the whole of him remembered.
He would not, could not, forget.
For now, however, he smiled for Eida and tucked his hands into his pockets as they strolled. He did not need to sully her with that side of his story.
"Yes," he agreed to her request regarding taking her into the Chavena so as to read her own Chavi easily. "When I am able to do such a thing," and he seemed certain he eventually would. "Then I will gladly take you, sister." |
(Oh and your avatar is nice! :3)