doesn’t mean i’m ready to stay
He has watched from the meadow, which has remained largely untouched, as the lands of old have risen again. The Chamber, the Gates, the Dale. And he had ached for the Tundra, his beloved Tundra, but there had been absolutely no sign of it when the dust had settled so it had been easy to pretend as if nothing had changed at all.
(He has watched Beqanna shudder through so many dozens of metamorphoses now. He has watched her shed her skin and shrug on a new one time and time again. He has watched her take his Tundra and he has watched her unearth new, unexplored lands. He has watched dark gods cobble together deserts and all the while he has yearned for the ice.)
Perhaps it is the meadow he should love most. (But Jarris has never loved the things that have loved him most, has he? He has tried, certainly. But the heart has always been a wanderer. And yet, he has stayed. And yet, she has forgiven him. And yet, he is here still.)
This is as far as he’ll let himself wander now: the Ruins. He picks his way through the wreckage and wonders about the world it had been. He has seen so many places, near and far, but never anything like this.
And as he moves, he leaves a trail of gold. Gold that cuts rivers down his cheeks, splashes underfoot. And he grimaces, too, against the thorns that bite into the flesh and pollutes those gold rivers with his blood.
What a sorry sight he is as he goes, teeth gritted, breath labored against the pain of it. But when he looks up, something inside him lurches. It is not the heart but something deeper, something that rattles in the marrow of his bones. He tilts his head and exhales. “You,” he says, “don’t I know you?”
It does not matter how she’s changed: the pulse of life in his veins knows exactly who it belongs to.
— Jarris
