Emberwood I got years of livin' by and how I choose

Too kind. Too lovely.

He couldn't take her looking at him, or rather, the way she seemed to look right into him, past the flat black of his eyes. So he was glad when she went on talking, even though the things she spoke of were deep and esoteric, and Kincaid was introspectic and deaf to his own heart in turns.

Even though he listened, it was a difficult concept to wrap his mind around. Who had ever thought to be in charge of the changes of the seasons, the earth, the slow spin of time? Kincaid felt he knew, in part, what she was saying — but he had never sought control over more than his own self; his body. The world was too big for anything else, and it made him feel small and vulnerable and maybe that was what Eleuthera meant. Maybe she was still reckoning with it. Maybe they all were, in their own way. It was why, he suspected, Nine Lives was always testing his limits and pushing himself to do new and dangerous things.

The short thought ended in a question he wasn't quite sure how to answer. Was that why he travelled? When he thought back on his reasons, he could only think of @Nine Lives and the fire in his eyes, and his face when he laughed, and the world stretching out before them, alive and open and wonderful. The two of them, walking side by side.

"You're too smart for me, darlin'," he said with a weak, uncertain laugh, several beats past when he should have opened his mouth to agree. "S'pose there's things I wish I could change. Things I'm runnin' from. S'pose I try not to dwell on it. But when you're on your own, sometimes that's the only thing to do."

He stole another glance at her, sorry he could not provide more profound conversation.

"Maybe that's part of it," he allowed, still struggling to grasp the concept. It would take a while for him to mull it over before he had much else to say about that. "But that ain't what I think about when I think about the open road. Not what I try to think about, anyway."