Atair
[ ah ty EER ]
✬ eness ✬
▻ al hilal ♂ & al murzim ♂ ◅
He is fading in and out, struggling to make certain that he’s conscious and sometimes failing intermittently. His dreams are feverish, nightmares roiling beneath the guise of a peaceful sleep.
The incarceration had been meant to do this, to leave lingering despair-- to maybe even keep him from safely returning to their new lands. There had been much animosity from those he’d trained, from those he’d inspired, from those who had trained him. They saw his absence as an affront to all that he had once stood for, regardless that they should have known his real job was protection of the crowned prince. The very crowned prince they had treated so horrendously as to have his daughter sell herself for his freedom.
That thought was eating him alive when he heard the approaching hooves and instantly realized that he had not been thinking clearly enough to remember how long he had been gone, how long he’d been in their clutches. The scent on the wind was not familiar, at least not anymore, and that alone was enough to inform him of his mistake. Her steps are floating, floating in a way that was more familiar than scent… she was at least a desertblood. He fades a moment and so the sound of her approach skips like a jostled recordplayer, jumping nearer and nearer with skips and hops of awareness. By the last fade and return she is upon him and he can tell so much more about this individual.
He shudders at the proximity of a stranger, so accustomed to that spelling danger now, but he is still not quite capable of finding his footing yet. His eyes open and roll up towards her at her introductive statement, the fiery blood in him rousing him with a surge of adrenaline. "Salem suffers no weak fools." She sneers at him, or so he perceives in her tone, and drives a gutteral groan-made-squeal of offense ripping up from his belly and spilling up his parched throat and maw. He does not think further than the surge to his feet, kicking the sand and earth about his legs and feet with the messy job he did of it.
"I am no fool, nor weak," he lashes out, gnashing teeth clearly poorly aimed due to the lingering disaster he’d been turned into by his trials. He manages to obtain his stance, but he does sway and seem to try to focus on her properly. "When my brothers and I left, we had not known we would be detained and withheld from the Dunes so long. If you are here and my brother no longer tends this oasis, then who has taken the Dunes? Who reigns now? Who do I find to give me permission to find my wife and sons, my brothers, their wives?" He does a good job of projecting a tone of authority, but the state of him might truly seem foolish.
Not only because of who it is that he speaks with in that moment, but also because it is so very obvious that the abuse he’d endured had rendered him rather easily defeated and toppled back to the earth with just one too-harsh breath.
OF THE LOST ISLANDS WILDS
▻ ten years - arabian - black with birdcatcher spots - 15.3 hh ◅