I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
Sleaze had thought, perhaps, that he would not return here.
For what did Beqanna hold? It was the land of his father and forefathers, sure, but Sleaze had come to the land and been met with madness, with an impossible reality, with years of trying to salvage something from himself. And had he succeeded?
He’d kept quiet, had gone to those in-between lands where he was left alone in a meadow to pray. It reminded him of simpler times, as his knees wore bare again, as he murmured half-formed prayers to gods he barely believed in.
It wasn’t the belief he needed, but the ritual. The burn of his knees as he bent to pray. He needed pain and for his mind to go blank as he recited the same words over and over until it was all just nonsense spewing forth from him.
But something called him back, in the way so many are called back. He wonders, sometimes, what it is – if there is some sort of honing call inside him, a migratory desire to return to this land, again and again, even as it only grants him pain, as it undoes his reality.
He walks the river, and looks at all the unknown faces. He had not known many in his time here, and he is sure the few he did are long gone, but he hopes, impossibly, to find them.
He does not – of course he does not – but instead he sees a pale mare, standing in the shallow water. He knows nothing of her – certainly does not know that she has met, has loved his father – but there is a draw about her, and his gaze keeps returning to her.
He summons his courage and steps closer, steps beside her in the river. It feels bold – feels stupid – but tonight, perhaps, Sleaze can be bold and stupid.
“Hello,” he says, and though he wants to say more – to apologize, immediately, for standing near her, to make some asinine comment on the weather – he does not, and instead stands silent, the water rushing at his ankles.
Sleaze
@[Agetta]