06-23-2021, 04:35 PM
In the wake of her answer, he's quiet for a moment, that smile still resting warmly on his lips, and the antennae that catch her eyes carefully testing the air as if they might taste the ghosts she speaks to. It has never occurred to Enoch to speak to ghosts, not even to try, and he considers that maybe this is rude. He is, after all, a prince of Ischia (never mind that Ischia is only a herd-land and no political actor, nobody who knows his grandmother could think of her as anything but a queen,) and he should know all the island's residents. In that brief silence, the young dun tips his head to the side as though to consider the girl from another angle.
"Were they indeed?" He likes this answer, even if he can feel the lie of it, and is happy to accept the compliment. "Yes, I was born here, not very long before the Kelpie King swallowed the sun."
(A local legend, one he's only just made up, and one very much known to be untrue.)
It's easy, in the bright sun and with a companion who is so nonchalant about it, to find his usual stride with the topic of ghosts and death, even for as much as the subject doesn't quite suit Enoch's island home. This is a place of peace, of family, of rest-- Well, he shouldn't get too carried away with his family's fiction. There are bones and skulls that still wash ashore, that are still hidden beneath the shining waters, tucked away too purposefully, tucked away from the prying eyes of anyone who can't swim deep enough to see. Ivar still lives - somewhere (probably,) either in the dungeon Aquaria made for him or some other forgotten corner of the world - but he's nothing more than a bogeyman to Enoch, a mythical creature used to frighten him into behaving when he was a child. Before the darkness came and he no longer needed lies to teach him caution.
"Do our ghosts have much to say? I don't think we've had anyone here that could speak to them before, so I'm afraid we may have ignored them a bit," his tone turns apologetic, long (noble, he thinks,) ears twisting like a second set of antennae, but if any spirits are whispering around them, he does not notice. For him, there is nothing flavoring the tropical air but the usual things, and the bright spice of her curiosity burgeoning in his chest.
"And have they led you anywhere else interesting?"
