He walks, primarily because he can.
He feels no fatigue, the muscles do not cry out with want for rest.
The chest does not heave with labored breath because he does not draw breath.
And the unbearable weight has been lifted.
He thinks of his sister still, but he no longer feels suffocated by the guilt of it. The pain is gone, replaced instead by the cold fist of ice in its ribbed cage. And perhaps this is worse, the fact that he longer feels anything at all. His sense of touch has been dulled so much that he almost does not register it at all and the emotions have stalled, too. The heart does not cry out in agony. Or love. Or anger. These things cannot penetrate the thick shield of ice closed around it now.
So, he patrols the border. Not because he needs to but because it satisfies his need to move. He feels no overwhelming urge to leave Pangea now. Not now that he has been reunited with Anaxarete, not now that she has given birth to their two children (the heart does not even yearn for their first daughter, somewhere out in the world maybe, or perhaps dead), not now that he feels as if he has something to escape.
It is in his wandering that he stumbles upon her, quite by accident. He’d thought about returning to the meadow because it had been the last place he’d seen her. He’d thought about going there to tell her that he was no longer in pain and that she need not worry about him. But he’d never quite gotten around to it, perpetually distracted by other things. Sometimes things as simple as his perpetual motion.
He sees her now and registers her as a friend but the heart does not stir and he does not smile. There is no longer a faint glint of warmth in his eye when he approaches her. “Agetta,” he says by way of greeting, tilting his head as he studies her. Had he known that she was here? “I didn’t realize you’d made Pangea your home, too.” He smiles then, but it is something automatic. It is not malicious, certainly, but there is something insincere about it.
