Rise from Ruin

What’s the point of having a big-ass house is you have to spend half your time first restoring and then once it’s all pretty, cleaning it? Seems like a waste of time unless one is going to open it to the public, have an equally big-ass family, or lots of parties. Wessex won’t pretend to understand the Outlander’s fascination with their own decaying ruins. There is a limit to this Natural’s benevolence, however, and it requires keeping a keen eye on the newcomers while they sleep. And then there are some who don’t sleep when they’re supposed to. Like calls to like, whether it’s in the pheromones, the smell, or in the tickling at the back of one’s neck that says something similar is just around the corner. Someone like Wessex. A night-walker. It is only his alienness that makes her cautious; it took her a couple of days to even swallow the idea that anything beyond the bubble could be similar - but no, many of them are just like the natives. It spun theories in her head while she gazed up at the stars - theories she had no one to talk to about. She prowls below him, unsure if he can sense her, if he does this to draw her out - or if he is oblivious. Are their gifts the same? Wessex hears a thud as the man lands on the floor, the gentle creak as he sits in a piece of old furniture, and then the tap-tap of something else. No point in waiting, she supposes. Pushing against a set of dusty double doors with ornate doorknobs that have long since been stripped of their gilded covering, Wessex enters the study confidently, as if she has every right to be here (and she does, this is her homeland), bold and barbaric all at once. A dark cloak covers most of her body, save for her rather pale face and long, blonde braid. “You’re like me,” she says simply. There is an element of surprise to her statement, but it is ever so slight. And really, it’s all they need to know. WESSEX she whispered back, I am the storm

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