How long had it been? A year? More? Time moved strangely since he had arrived in this alien world and Torchline's eternal summer, and he suddenly found a painful panic gripping his chest that he couldn't remember how long it had been since he'd seen the ravenkin last. A couple of days at the town to the west of the Forest, near the broad river that fell quickly to rapids within the deep woods, and thence to a waterfall. It was a busy place, with boat traffic turning to head back upriver and merchants passing through as goods transferred from dock to wagon to continue their journey. Journeys Kel sometimes guided, and it was while he was there waiting for such a job that he had run into his childhood friend, filled as always with tales of the world beyond the Green Kel had always known...
Tears slipped down his cheeks, lost in the water dripping from his hair. He realized he was shivering, that he had forgotten to breathe for long moments while he'd drowned in the sight of a man he had resigned himself to never seeing again.
It was impossible. A trick. An illusion, or a spirit, or someone who only looked the same--
An illusion that knew his name. A familiar cadence of poetry and swearing that could belong to no other, and a call to a goddess as distant now as his mother.
A strangled sound, half sob, broke from the hunter's throat as he flung himself into motion, rising heedless of his nudity in the thigh-deep water and scrambling to force his way through it, frustration mounting as the water fought his every step. He had glided gracefully over the bottom before; now his feet struck against stones hidden on the sand, cut against sharp shells as he struggled to close the distance between them, terrified with each passing second that the vision on the shore would fade away before he could reach him. That he would lose his world again, a sunlit nightmare in a tropical paradise as he stumbled and fell, pushing himself back up and moving faster as the water grew shallower.
"Rance, I don't-- I thought I was the only one-- That you - that everyone - was gone and--" He drew in a ragged breath, swallowing air in his haste, and limped up the final slope of white sand until he stood in a bare inch of water, the raven almost - almost - in reach. And then he stopped, shaking and yearning to reach out and touch, to prove that this wasn't a dream...
Too afraid, now, to quite complete the motion, in case doing so broke the spell.
Tears slipped down his cheeks, lost in the water dripping from his hair. He realized he was shivering, that he had forgotten to breathe for long moments while he'd drowned in the sight of a man he had resigned himself to never seeing again.
It was impossible. A trick. An illusion, or a spirit, or someone who only looked the same--
An illusion that knew his name. A familiar cadence of poetry and swearing that could belong to no other, and a call to a goddess as distant now as his mother.
A strangled sound, half sob, broke from the hunter's throat as he flung himself into motion, rising heedless of his nudity in the thigh-deep water and scrambling to force his way through it, frustration mounting as the water fought his every step. He had glided gracefully over the bottom before; now his feet struck against stones hidden on the sand, cut against sharp shells as he struggled to close the distance between them, terrified with each passing second that the vision on the shore would fade away before he could reach him. That he would lose his world again, a sunlit nightmare in a tropical paradise as he stumbled and fell, pushing himself back up and moving faster as the water grew shallower.
"Rance, I don't-- I thought I was the only one-- That you - that everyone - was gone and--" He drew in a ragged breath, swallowing air in his haste, and limped up the final slope of white sand until he stood in a bare inch of water, the raven almost - almost - in reach. And then he stopped, shaking and yearning to reach out and touch, to prove that this wasn't a dream...
Too afraid, now, to quite complete the motion, in case doing so broke the spell.
