RORY
Life was strange.Something had happened in the dark of Long Night, things Rory could not explain, could not name, could not pin down. A change, within. It wasn't just how strange and haunted his house felt when he returned to find all the floorboards loose and the nails pulled out, it was .. something else, too. Having abandoned every last shred of what made him a Natural when he'd ridden into the Long Night dark, he felt detached. Disconnected. Like this place he found himself in was no longer his place in the world.
The feeling had lingered with him as hours turned to days and he put his house back together. As he cleared up what needed to be cleared up. As he fixed and repaired and found his lost ponies outside again one morning, happily eating the hay he kept putting out for them.
His greatcoat was still in his workshop, unfixed. He needed to replace a section of leather on the chest, where Edy's flames had hit him. So for this day—sunny, bright, full of promise, yet with a cold bite in both shadow and breeze—he wore a couple of wool sweaters to keep out the memory of winter. Crawling up his throat and onto his face were the burn scars, another reminder of how this Long Night had been so different.
He still didn't feel quite himself as he hitched Talys to a post near Remi's shop and slid off her black back. His body was as healed as it would be, but even as the days turned he felt displaced. Out of sorts. Melancholy and adrift, wondering who he was.
In one hand, rather gingerly, he held the Spark Bird's ever-burning feather. He'd nearly had a couple of accidents with it before realizing he should treat it very carefully, lest he set something as bizarre as stone on fire.
With the other hand he reached out to knock on the alchemist's shop door, hoping that he was in, and that he wouldn't mind having his brain picked about the feather.
[ For Remi ]
as if you were on fire from within,
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.
