Seiji
Seiji’s eyes are on the water as it falls, his expression part wonder and part curiosity. There is no malice; the gods who named abandoned are not his gods, not yet. Perhaps they never will be. He feels only the familiar rush of his own ignorance and the desperate need to quench it. He turns, blinking up at Deimos’ formidable shape. The man’s eyes are cold, Seiji thinks. But he is not sure why. Whether the stony features are a gift of birth or a scar after a life hard-lived or something else, something more like a shield, held up to keep others away. He will go if he is not wanted, but this man is a friend of Amalia’s and so Seiji cannot help but want to know him, too.
“I know a friend who can make fire,” he says, recalling the display Kiada showed him on one of his first nights here. It seems to long ago, now. As if that Seiji were a different person, and that Kiada, too. “But that is different. Were you born here?” He cannot know Deimos is just as foreign as he. He cannot know how the stranger has suffered here, what he has been through. Though they’ve been all but neighbors for so long, they have lived very different lives in the Hollowed Grounds and beyond. To Seiji, the stranger might as well be from this beach, and only now returning home.
“I know a friend who can make fire,” he says, recalling the display Kiada showed him on one of his first nights here. It seems to long ago, now. As if that Seiji were a different person, and that Kiada, too. “But that is different. Were you born here?” He cannot know Deimos is just as foreign as he. He cannot know how the stranger has suffered here, what he has been through. Though they’ve been all but neighbors for so long, they have lived very different lives in the Hollowed Grounds and beyond. To Seiji, the stranger might as well be from this beach, and only now returning home.
