[private] I can feel the paradise before my world implodes

[bolder]

This is something that feels natural to Bolder. It feels as natural to him as any second-skin he might take, or even the first one that he had been born with. Even as a fish darting beneath the waves and finally diving deeper, swiftly racing through the currents with Malik, this is what natural order feels like to Bolder. It wasn’t like his cousin to hide anything from him – nor would Bolder hide anything from Malik – nor were these sullen moods.

It feels better to leave it behind them.

Bolder admires this shape – it has power and size – and he relishes both turning sharply through what remains of the Loessian rubble. He swims through and over the red-wall craters, down into the ravines before charging up towards the sunlight. The thought of leaping towards the surface propels him up, but the young shifter pauses halfway.

He looks beneath him again, eyeing what had once been the Southern Kingdom. Bolder takes notice of similar things that Malik does (and the thing that worries him most): that there is nothing that might explain why one day it resided above the sea and beneath the next. He listens as his cousin tells him that he had come to Loess once and the shifter begins the descent down towards the sandstone bottom.

”I don’t think so,” Bolder says through a series of air bubbles. He tells Malik about a pair of pegasi he encountered – a gray stallion and his amethyst-eyed daughter – searching for survivors not far from where they had stood. ”But maybe some did,” he clarifies, but the heavy silence that comes after suggests Bolder thinks otherwise.

”Does it look any different to you?” the large fish questions him, angling his pointed sword nose down towards the depths.

@Malik