Arrow Lake abbatia

sigh so angsty

germanicus did not know.

but he knew the look of gathered herbs and the insistence of her scent.

and he was indeed a tactician.

knowledge filtered dully through him but it was muted by his own resistance and the small limits of his true understanding.

meadow set her eyes toward the heavens and in them he saw the contemplativeness that had drawn him first to open. how cursed this all must be, to witness him again. to bear sight to the unraveling that he had not meant to let go.

the warming lake rippled with a soft breeze that carried both the bittering of green things and her own want into a cold swirl around his shoulders. she spoke of his children and germanicus looked away, eyes narrowing. a low sound scudded from his throat, something like hurt but he would not allow it to be.

meadow spoke of akashingo, put her paw upon the thrum of pain between mereo and epoch. between germanicus and arsenio.

"i was a ranger before this." the shadow flooded back to him in stark relief.

another hurting heart in his wake. another stab of guilt. another wave of loneliness. germanicus felt as though one day he truly would bend beneath this but he could not let it be this one.

"i will go back to it." 

meadow spoke of a future for him. but germanicus had brought to ruin three chances he had been offered by the old unsaid gods of editum. the rage rose again, for what he had built and what had had lost. "akashingo is a place of cold things. i am glad you did not become one of them." he felt the familiar taciturn nature of who he had been rising, rearing a formerly tired head with a spark of desperate hope.

"reyson will wait for you to make your decisions if he is the wise man i know him to be."

reyson, who had given his all to mereo and deserved his rest.

and yet germanicus could not foist the anger from him.