He wakes with the taste of salt on his lips and the sunrise in his eyes.
There is fineness to the scene he sees every morning, a casual grace that he never takes for granted. If their world had been stripped bare because of their sins, then the world that came next was meant as a peace offering from the gods. This world was not better or worse, merely different. His world was leagues ahead of anywhere he had previously lived. She had brought him home; it no longer matters where his feet are stayed, only that they stop alongside hers’.
Walter watches the horizon. He follows the gathering waves in the distance, watches as they roll in and roil before breaking on the shore just ahead of him. He repeats the cycle until his eyelids are seared golden and his ears buzz. When the gulls lift into the air and begin their morning calls (popping into their loud existences seemingly out of nowhere, as they are fond of doing) he concedes his stretch of shore with a silent scowl.
There is still an alien lightness to his steps that feels too much like floating. A part of his disdain for the flying scavengers is rooted in the loss of his own wings (the other part from a long-standing, mutual hatred he shares with the avian family). It has taken him longer to master movement without the balancing set of his wings than it had to learn how to use them in the first place. The sand helps, at least. He is forced to slow his stride to keep atop each uneven mound between him and his destination.
When the cliffs rising at his left shoulder are finally tall enough to house caves, Walter sees that he is no longer alone. Nerine is a rather noisy kingdom, but unfortunately, it is due to the crashing water on the rocks rather than the number of its people. He imagines that the queen would have it differently, but it suits him all right. Like Beqanna itself, the old stallion was rebuilding himself anew. Where better to do so than the empty edge of a land where the ocean strips and cleanses the earth each day? He smiles faintly, distracted by his thoughts, when a mare passes him. It isn’t her, so he doesn’t bother to call her back for conversation. The reformed, almost-Sisterhood still loses him in its motivations. Sometimes, he wakes in the morning thinking he will ask what his place in this land is, what he should do to help. Always, he realizes he doesn’t care – realizes that he is here for one purpose only.
The taste of seagrass is too bitter and completely unsatisfying, but he lowers his head to it like he has every day since he landed here. Around him, the sounds of the progressing day grow louder. Within him, peace prevails for the first time since his youth.
He isn’t foolish enough to believe it will last forever. Good things never did.
Walter
come down from the mountain
you have been gone too long