But it was more than willing to taunt him. Through the trees he saw a flash of golden light, gorgeous and bright and what he'd been missing since he arrived in this world. She was the sun, burning through the thicket, the brightest star. Kiki came to a full stop, his honey brown eyes locked on the goddess. So lost in her beauty that he didn’t even notice his group moving on and Jigano being attacked by the brush. For a moment he could only see her, who followed a separate path. A brighter path. Had she come to bring him back to Regne du Jour and all that was? The boy took a few steps towards her, a smile beginning to form on his lips, a glimmer of hope that he was awakening from this long dream, but then he stopped.
The heat, it was just that. It was a powerful warmth that he felt, but not hers. No, it was too soon to have forgotten the way Soleil's presence filled him with such radiance, the way his veins would pulse with liquid light. This was not that, this was a trick of the eyes, a cruelty of the great wood. This world was no long dream, Caido was real and he wouldn’t ever go back - he knew that. But he'd been so close to something just now, so close to a feeling that he thought he'd never know again. A strange magic kept trying to pull him towards her, be it his own instincts telling him she was real, or the wildwood's fingers pulling tightly on his strings.
Killian hitched a deep breath, bringing his hand up to press his palms into his eyes. Wake up, he reminded himself the dream was there, reality was here and now. When he dropped his hands again, she was still waiting, calling to him in all her beautiful glory. There was an odd guilty pit in his stomach as he walked away from her, as if he were letting her down. A failure again, always a failure. Even as he caught up with the others he could still feel those fiery eyes boring into his skull, wincing when he could hear her booming call in his mind, hotter and hotter. But it wasn’t the same, that was the only thing that kept him on their assumedly right path.
listen to the sound of the world
don’t watch it turn
