jamie
from the destruction, out of the flame
It did not happen overnight.
No, the change in him was gradual.
So subtle that he hardly noticed it.
Until he woke one morning and found no phantom ache. There was no tremble in his limbs. The joints – real or imagined, he still had not determined which – did not throb. Still, his chest rattled when he breathed but it did not fatigue him. He summoned a portal that delivered him from one end of Pangea to the other and then, immediately after, summoned another back again. It labored his breathing, certainly, but he did not collapse with the effort.
And when he summons another portal, he emerges by the edge of the river and feels nothing at all. No trace of the exhaustion that had marooned him for days the last time he’d done it. He thinks briefly of Beyza, his mother, their magic and who could have healed him. It does not occur to him that it is a matter of biology.
And he could summon a portal home without having to build up the strength to do it. But he does not. He lingers there at the water’s edge as if waiting for something. Or someone. And perhaps he is.
It is daylight now. There is no shadow for him to sink into. He is the darkness. The fog that gathers around his legs is thicker in the sunlight, as if trying to protect him from it.
you need a villain, give me a name
