(no subject)

[monolike]

[He sleeps.

The plan had been simple, though Sorey hadn't known if it would work; act as Maotelus's vessel, cut off all his senses, and exist as a living pulse of purification. If he slept he wouldn't change, if he slept within Maotelus's domain he (hopefully) wouldn't die. It would mean he would be lost to the ravages of time, left behind by everything he knows, but this way he could eliminate at least a little bit more of the suffering the world had already endured. Maybe it's fueled in part by ego. Maybe he just can't leave things alone for someone else to clean up. Either way, Sorey closes his eyes and prepares to rest.

Only...he doesn't.

He doesn't dream, he doesn't experience some other world or existence; what he feels instead is a spread. His eyes aren't his and he can't choose what to focus on, and sometimes he hears things and sometimes he doesn't. For decades at a time all he hears is the slow growth of earth around the crater, vegetation creeping in and animals settling within it, rain trickling down to form a lake that empties over time during the more severe droughts. Sorey feels Glendwood change around him (and it becomes other names, Nothrand, Lilium, Morensa) and he realizes, an embarrassing few centuries later, that he's not awake but he's experiencing the world through Maotelus's blessing.

It's surprisingly soothing. Even when he watches civilizations build and crumble, Maotelus is there with him to talk him through the agony of observing war. It's hard, he says in his childlike voice, seated in Sorey's lap in the shared spaces of their souls, leaning his head back against his chest, it's hard just to watch, but sometimes people don't want to have peace. Freedom is the most important. You have to remember that.

Maotelus tells him stories about his old life, stories about what the world was like before Sorey was born. He laughs and affectionately calls Sorey naive, calls him young, even as he passes into his sixth century. We're unchanging to an extent, maybe, but I think you'll always be young no matter what.

Sorey told him he didn't want to hear that from someone whose voice hasn't even deepened and Maotelus pretended to sulk for almost four full years.

When Sorey becomes unable to feel the edges of the tainted world, he knows his time asleep as an observer is coming to an end. He's done all that he can; Maotelus knows he can't stay here forever, that no matter how powerful either of them are, Sorey can't do the impossible and purify the whole world just by remaining asleep. That everything is cyclical only when it's not, and that maybe Sorey can do more good in the world if he's awake for just a few decades more, to tell people what he saw, to pass on what he knows.

I love you, Sorey thinks even as sleep takes him further and further from Maotelus, I'll miss you.

Don't be silly, Maotelus chides. I'll always be right beside you.

- - -

Sorey wakes.

It takes some time, but he makes his way out of the crater. The air smells clean in a way he can just barely remember from Gramps's domain in Elysia and he breathes it in fully. His body is the same as it was when he went to sleep; clothes ripped and dirty, muscles sore. Seventeen and human, but he remembers everything, remembers centuries of watching, waiting, talking with Maotelus. He knows that at any given point one of his friends is watching over him, and knows that it's just a matter of time until he's found.

So he plucks a few apples from a tree, chooses a flat stone to sit down on, and waits. They'll find him before he finds them, now that he's just a regular human again, so he should make it easy and stop moving around.]

Comments

[airily]

[ It's been a long time.

Zaveid has done things, of course, to occupy his mind. He travelled with the Shepherds for a while, one after another, being passed along like an old weapon until he was too old and too tired and too heartsick to keep going. Watching himself get close to humans and then watching them die... It was too much. So he travelled, went back to being alone, came and checked in on Sorey and Lailah and the others and never really drifted too far. He had nowhere else he wanted to go or wanted to be and he was happy with that; he was fine, accepting this as the path he was going to walk, in exile but not alone.

Time doesn't really move for Seraphim the same way it does for humans, after all; things aren't quite that simple, and it goes on and on without him being entirely aware of what's happening. Zaveid lives it and he doesn't quite realise just how long things have gone on until someone mentions it and then he's a little bit baffled by it. He feels older now than he ever did before, as if his bones are creaking even though he's well aware that he's still fairly young in the terms if immortal Seraphim. Perhaps it's just how much he's seen, how much he's lived - or maybe it's just because he's been waiting for such a long time, waiting for one ridiculous boy to wake up from his nap.

(Well, two of them, if he's being honest, but he's aware that he's more likely to see Sorey than he is Laphicet, no matter how close he wants to get to Maotelus, the kid he knew once upon a time).

When it comes, it's not a tidal wave of power or something breaking on the edge of the crater. It's nothing that huge, really, and it shouldn't surprise him even though it does. What he feels, instead, is something soft and gentle unfurling in his chest and something prickling at his senses, suddenly on high alert as he drinks the wind in. It seems to whisper to him and before he knows it he's on his feet, pushing himself up and dipping down and through the tangled overgrowth that protects the Shepherd's rest.

The feeling doesn't move or change, not really, but Zaveid rides the wind anyway, a whirlwind of artes as he presses through and seeks out that tug on his heart, the gentle reminder of something incredible that he had almost forgotten about. His heart is pounding in his chest and he feels desperate with it, something intense and dangerous prickling at him, some kind of fear that if he doesn't get there fast enough, if he's not there soon enough, something terrible will happen. He was always too slow before but he can't let that happen again, never again -

He breaks through and he sees Sorey and for a moment he feels completely and utterly breathless, buoyed on his feelings and hanging on the edge of a cliff, close to stepping off and tumbling forward into a world he's been waiting for. Eventually, he manages to catch his breath and, when he does, his face cracks into a wide grin and he strides forward, suddenly filled with that oh so familiar bluster. ]

Sorey.