73rd of Ash, 120
The winding trunks of foreign trees lay scattered along the hillside that Arkash had taken his long rest upon. He hadn't seen the likes of them anywhere in Lorien and thought them to be unique to the country's arid climate. He did enjoy the hot and the dry, at least in his True form, but as well-kept a secret as that was, Arkash rarely got to experience the sun on his basalt scales.
The sun was warm on his bare, lightly worn scales. The darker shade of basalt that framed his beige underbelly was perfect for soaking up the sun's heat and supplying his otherwise cold blood with the flexibility to move unhindered. After all, he'd spent most of his life in Lorien slow and sluggish from the cold. His muscles didn't work right after a certain point. The sun? All he had to do to regulate his internal temperature was open his mouth, and filter out the hotter air.
He was made for Daravin, it felt. Well, for the land. He hated the people of the country he currently sunbathed in, but the weather and the foliage were wonderfully cozy to the young Rathor. It must have been where his species as an ice-blood originated from, he could think of no other innate reason for his taking to the environment around him. If he'd been born there, initiated in magic young, survived, and had been able to spend the first dozen or so years of his life outside, with others like him, how would he have turned out in the present? How different could his life have been if Liu and Cojack had decided to settle in Daravin instead of that frozen wasteland?
Liu and Cojack, his beloved mother and father. Cojack had passed just the year prior, overdosed in some Inn after being separated from Arkash. Though the thought of his Father's hopelessness and despair in his last moments wrenched his heart from his chest and often brought him to tears, he'd learned to make peace with what happened. Cojack had been ill, so very ill, for so long. In his last months, he was naught but a withered shell of what he had once been. His suffering disrupted Arkash's nights with groans of pain, coughing fits, and pitiful sobbing. There was no way Cojack could have gotten better, his condition only declined over the years that he and Liu had been buying him medicine; Cojack was doomed to die, sooner or later. The fact that he wasn't suffering anymore helped settle Arkash's weary mind, his only regret was that Cojack had taken his life because he thought his son was gone. If the withered horse had passed naturally, with Arkash there, or even if he'd been at work at the time, it wouldn't have driven him to take his own life some few months after.
He couldn't change what happened, and ultimately, Cojack was better off now than he had been. It hurt to admit, but he'd wished that the horse would slip away in the night for many nights while he slept on that wooden floor. It was better now, even if he didn't have closure.
Liu, on the other hand. She'd been taken far too quickly from him. There was no build-up or long-drawn-out process. She just stopped coming home one day, and he found her discarded, broken body, partly frozen in some dank Lower Nivenhain alley the next day. They surmised that she was killed by hollows for stealing from the Savant she worked for, and the only reason she'd had to steal from the Savant was that Arkash didn't work, and he'd told her not to traffic contraband in the underworld of those slums for money. They were declining as a result, and she'd been desperate. She couldn't feed three mouths while buying medicine for her sick husband, all while trying to save up for their new life far away. So, she cut corners on the food part. it worked for the best part of a week, and then she was killed without question; bludgeoned by those lifeless things.
Arkash opened his yellow eyes where he laid on that slope, and his eyes cast to the open blue sky and the odd cloud that drifted by. The smell of decay filled his nostrils as a gust of wind blew by. Similar hallucinations of her death often plagued him; the light tricked his eyes and he sometimes saw her mangled body cast in dark corners of whatever room he was in at the time, only to find a pile of discarded cloth or hay in its place. He closed his mouth then; it was becoming dry. His claws moved to support his head from the hardness of the packed earth while he continued to bathe in the warming glow the sun provided.
Would she still love him as she had if she could see him now? Would she understand the animal he had become in her absence? His heart sank when he considered that she might turn away from him, blame herself for his actions. It wasn't her fault that the world was broken. She'd tried to protect him from its evils, but they were too loud to ignore. No one else worked to make it right, no one even knew how broken the world was except those who'd suffered at the hands of the oppressive elite. Though he wanted to tell her he didn't fight the world because it had taken her from him, he couldn't bring himself to lie to her, not to her.
The smell of decay clung to his nostrils well, it seemed. No doubt if he looked around, he'd see her body somewhere, and the panic would set in shortly after. So, the rathor didn't. He kept his eyes shut and opened his mouth to breathe, even if he could almost taste the death that clung to the air on his forked tongue.
