Having rolled the kindling of his precious ashen friend’s ambitions together between his large palms until he thought he smelled smoke, the Kingbreaker abandoned him to his chosen fate. What would come of it he is eager to see, but his has always been a force of patience. He hasn’t done so much to act rashly now, and so he leaves Rehoboam to think- and to act- of his own accord. The Lagoon is a simmering pot- one that holds little for him at the moment, though he suspects the future of it might intrigue him, should it waken from the stupour it displayed when he wandered its lush, quiet greenery. The Peak, then, should be his next destination, and so he underwent the long and silent trek, through valley and mountain, rippling meadow and clattering loose rock on treacherous hillside.

It, like the Lagoon before it, is hushed at his arrival, every living creature seemingly holding its breath for some great and terrible thing on the horizon. Lonely grey spires form jagged teeth along a storming sky, the wailing of wind overthrown by the echoing screaming of trees being ripped bodily apart by lightning and the bone-deep growl of thunder. He takes the lower paths, partially sheltered from the sheets of rain and hidden from the wrath of lightning, and the one he follows leads him to the barren beach and the dark and churning sea beyond. For a while, he stands and stares out to sea and waits- in the thrall of the storm and surrounded by ozone, it seems as if some great inevitability is making its way toward him, or toward the Peak, or toward some hapless beast within it, and he waits for it, breathing deep the smell of the welkin pressing down around him.

It is not some unbearable force that comes to him, however, but shadowy dot in the gloaming distance; a surging, sinking, re-surging shape that throws itself against the choppy waves, again and again, until at last it staggers free of the pull of the sea a ways down the cold grey shore from him, half obscured by rock and frothing tide.

And so it is the Kingbreaker, then, who is the inevitability, drifting through the charged atmosphere to the child in the surf, his dark edges seething with coiling black hair in the crying winds. The boy shivering and alone in the water is younger even than Rehoboam, but there is a striking similarity between them, in the long fineness of their bones and yawning scars of white striping their bodies, and even the dimmed softness of their dark pelts. Perhaps, the Kingbreaker thinks, the copper glitter in his eyes turned old-blood brown in the flashing light, there is a force at work after all.

“What is this that the sea has given up on such a hungry day,” he rumbles, matching the thunder ringing overhead, and it is no question- not poised to this child, at least, because this one he’ll answer himself, his great dark legs driving eddies before them as they sink into the tide, his massive body a wall blocking the rain from reaching him even as he draws close enough that his dark muzzle drips icy speckles down the translucency of the boy’s white shoulder where he examines him. Sluicing storm-water and cold curiosity from his steaming silhouette, he tolls on,

“How very lost and alone you look, my dear.”

His great steel head tilts, slowly, a performative act of idle interest, though the smoking spark of recognition in his russet stare is far from idle.

“…Are you?”