[SE] revealed to be hollow

DEIMOS

the resurrected sword

The sea was not so readily a siren as the mountains; but still there, still present, in the back of his mind, familiar and enticing. Childhood capacities had clung and varnished from their depths, from racing across the surf, barefoot imprints in the sodden sand, the outcry of gulls, to the scent of salt on the breeze. Waves were candid reminders of days spent in youthful disarray, gallivanting far and wide, seeing which individual could hold their breath the longest, how long it would take their parents to find them along shoals and sandbars, what monsters riddled the fathoms as they dove. The ocean was like his mother, stern and occasionally unforgiving, and like his father, temperamental and strong.

So he roamed along its side, pressing his weight into the wake of its beauty, in the siege of its might. It wasn’t home, it wasn’t moonlit tides, lit by luminescence and wonder, but it was there, tangible, relaxing, soothing, for a mind constantly seething, sieging, or rampaging.

Maybe here, he could finally practice the blood-stoked lineage pulsing through his veins.

Last intervals and invocations had been made in abrupt haste: attempting to cast icy shields and wayfaring ramparts, melting snow and dragging dragon forms across deadly caverns. The time before had been mere discovery, and not enough time to soak in the awe, the capabilities.

He lifted one hand, and watched one wave curl, undulate, ripple from his ministrations. Stark, brutal reminders; like witnessing Stone’s castings, and he soaked it in for an instant, before repeating the movement, the gesture, fingers raised, fist clenching, as the water rose, steady and sure, revolving in a gentle coil, circling above the current.

under the bludgeonings of chance
my head is bloody, but unbowed

Seiji

Seiji remembers.

Not — this. Not everything. But he remembers. The creaking voices of the gulls, the sigh of the waves, the rocky shore smooth underfoot. Even the place where the rocks gave way to black sand. He remembers that and then nothing else, nothing save hoarse laughter in his throat and someone else’s bare feet beside his own. Running — running around the elbow of some distant island as if something wondrous waited just around the corner. The memory flooded in suddenly some time ago, triggered by the smell of salt or the texture of the sand, and now he wanders along the coast savoring it. Probably something here is dangerous, and probably something here will try to kill him, but he does not feel mortal in this moment. He feels like — danger no longer matters to him.

He feels happy.

And if plants can live on sunlight, and little fish can live on seawater alone, something in Seiji lives on happiness. He keeps thinking of that place, the place in memory, the sand and rocks and the breathless running, the bite of sea air in his lungs. He keeps breathing in, and in and in, in great breaths, as if he can capture the whole coast this way and hold it inside himself. Nothing in Caido is perfect, but this — well, this is close.

His dark eyes reflect a thousand points of light as they dance on the crests of waves. Seiji carries his shoes in one hand, and the hem of his shirt flutters in the wind. He would be cold if he were not preoccupied, but his coat he carries slung over his shoulder, the long fingers of his left hand hooked through the collar. And he is smiling. And he is watching the waves. His feet carry him along, down the length of bone-white sand like the disintegrating spine of some old long-dead fish. In his head, Seiji is composing music. The muscles in his wrist make miniscule movements, hidden by the things he carries, but his fingers are very lightly tapping out a song far different from the one of sorrow he conjures up when he’s alone. This one is — lively. A song for flower buds and birds, though Leafchange now clutches Caido all around him.

Seiji does not think of this when first he sees the figure out in front of him. Not until he draws near, and nearer still, and some distant spark of recognition fires in his brain. The wild hair, the broad shoulders, even the stony brow above those distant eyes — Seiji has seen this man before. He cannot call him friend, cannot even say he knows Deimos, but he recognizes him. They have both been in the Hollow Ground some time, and well, the general is difficult to miss. From some distance still, Seiji waves, and his head tilts as his eyes move from the man to the man’s outstretched hand to the curl of water resisting all the impulses of its peers.

Magic.

“You are doing that?” Seiji asks when he is close enough, his eyes wide. “You can move the water?”

DEIMOS

the resurrected sword

Lost in the parallels, he drowned in the wake of too many uncertainties, and too many broken, whittled armaments. The waves continued to rise on his prowess, his dominion, and he wasn’t certain if he should be proud or exhausted, watching the pool ascend, witnessing branches of rivulets stream forth into the air, careen, twist, and bend, like nooses, like claws, like boughs. His breath was easy, as if he’d braved a thousand storms and this was nothing but nostalgia, memories, and the wake, the vestiges, the ethers of so many other strangled moments. Somewhere it felt sacred, and then unjust, in the pits and pinnacles of his gut, diving like a hurricane, like a harpoon, in the carved sieges, in the rattling of cages. Asking why now after all this time, after all the lineages, all the sacrifices, all the tragedies, didn’t seem to matter. There’d be no answers. There’d be no response. There’d be no reply. More enigmas, more quandaries, more perils; his mother’s gift pressing in on his existence. And what to do with it, other than shielding, other than defending, other than –

A voice over the waves, over the sea, over the rooted thorns slanted into his ribs. It bounded and ricocheted for a moment, settling into his mind, crawling, slower-paced, languid, listless, as if he couldn’t quite fathom them, his eyes staring straight ahead at the whirlwind of enchantments scouring the surface. Even if he’d spent multiple lives trying to blend into shadows, trying to feed into darker intervals, trying to be naught but hollowed sanctions and unattainable fathoms, the world still found him.

He turned, head over his shoulder, and the mysticism, the concentration, faded into oblivion. The water ceased, desisted, flowing like a veil, like a curtain, back to its collected brethren. Recognition dawned on him in the midst of silence, Seiji, but naught else except the name from the lantern making. Finally, his breath eased, a contortion of reflections in stoicism, in reticence, in the glimmer of curious strands. “Yes,” he obliged, not sure where this would lead. Not many had bombarded him with their thoughts on magic, on distorting reality, on feeding the earth with the depths of his ire or capability. But it didn’t mean they weren’t still out there: growling, rumbling, their remorseless intonations on the creatures known as Abandoned.

under the bludgeonings of chance
my head is bloody, but unbowed

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.

DEIMOS

the resurrected sword

The lack of menace thereafter allowed some of the ramparts and fortifications to fall: his backbone less rigid, his shoulders less taut, the entire figure seemingly taking a sigh of relief, a breath in the footholds of sands and surf. Eternally ready for a fight, for defense, for cataclysms, and the rest was sometimes entirely unknown, scraping against the feral outlines of his lifetimes. He blinked and the guard in his gaze wasn’t so drawn and carved, less piercing, less chill, more like the water before them. He still glanced, he still pondered, about how the worlds collided, assimilated, conjured, and manifested – his eyes settling back upon the figure, one Amalia considered a companion by her expression during lantern making. They’d lost so many lately.

He bit down on some other bile, a tilt to his head to break apart the formidable reaches, more man than statuesque Colossus. A friend who could make fire – and his palms itched with the embers, the kindling, the incendiary pieces sliding between his veins, gifts and prestige passed from father to son. “No,” he answered at first; wondering if somehow he’d made it seem like he’d been contorted from this region, the way he blended and learned, or if it was just mere inquiry, a way to pass into the silence. “I was born in Isilme.” Outlander, no matter how many years he’d lived within these confines. But oceans were familiar, just as mountains, the threat, the power, the majesty, the danger, the prestige of them all curled and coiled through minds and manners. “Were you born here?” He extended and echoed in return, quiet, barely audible over the rising waves.

under the bludgeonings of chance
my head is bloody, but unbowed