Jade Fern Grove sturdied up boulders and loosened the river

caligula’s pulse still fluttered too-fast in his chest, a bird’s wings beating into his ribcage despite the looseness of his limbs, wobbly with the sudden rush and relief of adrenaline. it echoed dizzily in his head, filling his senses, muting even the lingering buzz of insects, and arbiter’s words came to him as if over a long distance, one larger than the dozen or so feet between them.

but they did come.

it took a long, fuzzy moment for his thoroughly overwrought brain to make sense of any of what she had said. but when it did, finally, click into place, it was without his input that his gaze shifted uncomfortably to the side. he was aware of the impossibility of this merrick leaping from the treeline to assault him; rationality, no matter how strongly he desired to cling to it, had never once overcome instinct – an instinct that, these days, provided him little more than base terror.

“then, ah…i should not have…” he stopped himself before he could finish the thought, shaking his head. his agreement, or lack thereof, mattered not at all; she did not need to hear it, and he did not need to be told. “you are worried he will come? and this…your legion will fight him?”

good intentions teetered on a sharper knife’s edge than he found entirely comfortable. merrick did not seem so entirely unfamiliar – to have run so far to stumble into this, a mirror as though he had never left…it was not only his memory haunting him.