who we are and all that we're trying to be
A shrug to his shoulders at the first inquiry, only knowing of its potential from earlier sojourns and ventures. “We did some farming here earlier in the year. It should suffice.” Placed irrigation routes and deviated water, attempted sourcing and inclining rivulets to feed the seeds tucked into the earth: the crops a short way off, striving to survive the summer heat. If this soil and loam wasn’t enough, perhaps there were some other places amongst the grounds where he could search – like Amalia’s garden – but he’d figured he could collect the other fragment here too, alleviating some of the wandering and further, mounting pressure.
Continuing his walk towards the outskirts of timber, tall, broad, and a living, breathing ruin, he glanced over his shoulder, taking in Adam’s view, the way his gaze had settled on the marked, battered world before him. “Safrin did not specify.” Which meant it was open to interpretation, and he’d rather dig into the earth for something old, ancient, decrepit, and truly gone, than risk the multitudes, the masses, of fresh catacombs and wraiths before them. “I would rather find something already deceased.” Maybe an old kill of some other predator, buried into leaf litter or forgotten, picked apart, its use long lost to hunters and gatherers – now only left for them to find and relegate to a goddess. At the final inquiry, his gaze went back to the trees, to the ground, to anything bleached and long since gone; a sigh piercing, penetrating there, nearly inaudible, soundless, like everything else he conjured. “That is the plan.”
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts
