who we are and all that we're trying to be
Oh, there’d been fighting. There’d been death. There’d been poisonous miasma choking, stifling, coating his throat, his lungs. There’d been drones of insects intertwining their way into his skin. There’d been Fae chanting drumming in his ears, Shields and Sages and an abundance of other things he couldn’t reach. There’d been explosions, basements crumbling, eroding, falling apart all around them as they scorched, blistered, and tore apart the stone structures at the seams. There’d been repairs. There’d been gaping holes where goddesses had fallen from the sky. There’d been ancient things crawling out of pillars and ruins, desecrated in the next sweep and turn. A thousand other notions could have clambered and walled themselves in those shackled, tethered, monolithic pieces, and for now, he wanted nothing to do with it – head down, eyes on the rest of the world around him, people and inhabitants he understood, he helped, he strived to protect.
His movements weren’t an echo of motion at all, but threaded silence, wraith, phantom contortions in their own means and measures, hushed and slinking along worn pathways and rubbled dirt, around crisp, bitter, decaying leaves. His thoughts were nearly the same, not molding or melding anymore of the torturous chambers behind him, shoving the weight off his shoulders, off his backbone, repelling, forgoing, forbearing, forbidding.
But Chulane was not the same; the words expressed and echoed. He had nothing to be sorry for, not really; the horrors would existed long before and they would reverberate, resound, well after too. It’d been experience in the trials, the tribulations, the treachery of the unknown, and how often they fought against or for sentiments, ruminations, they didn’t quite understand.
Life is precious burned against him too; for he’d taken many, and lost his own.
Instead of blistering further, he wound his way down paths of domiciles, of residences, of settlements, and guilds, far better, far brighter, than the minaret they left behind. A quiet tour, his eyes pausing momentarily on bakeries, on barracks, on his and the Shield’s house further off, lights of the fire from the hearth illuminated off of windows. A pang shuddering somewhere in his chest.
The Sword naught on the subject of infuriating countenances and their contortions, the maddening work and expectations of gods; Chulane would learn on his own soon enough. Instead, it was the following inquiry that permitted the briefest shift of his quiet into a drifting rumble. Ludo once asked a follower to murder an Ascended. Other than that, he couldn’t trace another tale; perhaps that too was a mystery, an enigma, wrapped up and knotted, gnarled and noosed, in someone else’s journey amidst deities.
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts
