[open] I thought that love was a kind of emptiness; birthing, any

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he must be wicked to deserve such pain;

His agony, his worst moment, was made a plot point, and he never knew it.
He never knew how many watched him stalk across the sands to Craft, watched him end her life, his own eyes rolling on the sand, screaming is this enough? He’d been there too – this version, the now-version – but he didn’t know there were others.
(Well. He knew of one other. Agetta, who watched the worst parts of him unfold and forgave him, loved him. But what would she think of him now, with a dark god’s child at his hip?)
So when the chestnut mare comes close, looks at him in confusion, he doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know her journey.

He only hears her words, the you exhaled through tight lips, and he feels guilt well up. It’s an easy thing, when you bear so many sins – guilt always sits at the ready. He looks at her again, trying to see if he knows her, but she is unfamiliar. He wonders if he knew her, once, before his first death – those memories are foggy, sometimes – but nothing comes to him, not even a glimmer.
She is a stranger, speaking to him like she knows him.
You have a child, she says, and he moves closer to Bad, protective, though she does not seem harmful – just strange, so very strange.
“I’m sorry,” he says – his default answer – “do we know each other?”

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@[lilliana]