It was not that no one could have predicted this day. It was that they had been lulled into a false sense of complacence by how comparatively quietly Dahlia's hand had rested upon Stormbreak's tiller. Now the storm was upon them and the very keel of that ancient region was cracking beneath the strain. Many of tts people - proud, insular, learned, and traumatized - given the options to submit or flee had largely chosen flight, and there had been no hesitation in either leader to offer them a safe harbor.
The Tidebreaker's face was solemn but serenely stoic, and no one who could read otherwise was near enough to sense the storm within, darkening with every new shipful of desperate refugees who landed with tales of terror. Of injuries sustained or loved ones lost in the second Tower's fall.
It was not the first time that he and Flora had worked together to create stations around Haulani and Kaiholo, and they had worked swiftly and well with their staff to stock supplies of food, of hygiene, of clothing and small comforts for those who would arrive in disarray.
"The guards, or myself," he replied to Flora just as quietly. "And I will teleport them to the Climb." He did not care to have any Family spies in Torchline just now, no matter that it was not their fault. The Climb would be unpleasant and take time for them to leave, but it would probably not kill them. Not if he dropped them in Frey's Breath, at least.
He stayed quiet as Flora handled the greetings and the assurances, offering his own presence as a demigod of Safrin as much as King to calm those arriving. The dark scales of his hippocampus shift rippled over his bare arms and back, sparkling with distant stars and nebulae and the starlit tines of his trident were a beacon promising protection and safe haven beneath the goddess's mantle.
The Tidebreaker's face was solemn but serenely stoic, and no one who could read otherwise was near enough to sense the storm within, darkening with every new shipful of desperate refugees who landed with tales of terror. Of injuries sustained or loved ones lost in the second Tower's fall.
It was not the first time that he and Flora had worked together to create stations around Haulani and Kaiholo, and they had worked swiftly and well with their staff to stock supplies of food, of hygiene, of clothing and small comforts for those who would arrive in disarray.
"The guards, or myself," he replied to Flora just as quietly. "And I will teleport them to the Climb." He did not care to have any Family spies in Torchline just now, no matter that it was not their fault. The Climb would be unpleasant and take time for them to leave, but it would probably not kill them. Not if he dropped them in Frey's Breath, at least.
He stayed quiet as Flora handled the greetings and the assurances, offering his own presence as a demigod of Safrin as much as King to calm those arriving. The dark scales of his hippocampus shift rippled over his bare arms and back, sparkling with distant stars and nebulae and the starlit tines of his trident were a beacon promising protection and safe haven beneath the goddess's mantle.
