Bereft: Foretold

26 | A Wandering King

Wandering in the turbid dark of that unknowable realm, the spirit continued her wayward journey. 

So many threads had unraveled, plucking apart the spirit at the seams, though she held tightly to some, refusing them leave despite the persistence of their dissipation. She knew there was a reason for their presence, and there was something she was meant to do—but in the nothingness of that place, meaning didn't exist.

The only point of existing was the onward sway of the spirit's motion and the slow dispersal of all that she was.

She held no conception of time, didn't know minutes from hours from days from weeks—and, for all she knew, she had always been in this place and was yet another part of its inflexible weave. Even so, she felt like she belonged somewhere else and wanted to believe that feeling, because it was one of the few things she still held onto.

In her sightless meandering, the spirit became aware of something else existing in the void ahead of her. She didn't know what it was, but she was drawn to it, her motions no longer meaningless as she drifted nearer the disturbance. 

Like a moth to a flame. 

The expression came unprompted to her mind and the spirit delighted in its meaning, because she recognized what a moth was and what a flame was, and even recognized that she could delight in such things. She knew the disturbance was a light issuing from a flickering lantern, and—as she came to its feathered edges—saw there was a person standing in its glow. 

A person, just like how she was a person: a person who didn't belong in this place.

The spirit looked upon the man as he gazed out into the colorless abyss. His hair was white but not with age, the strands like silver and platinum woven into fresh snow, swept forward in severe, jagged pieces. The two eyes resting beneath the sharp slant of his gray brows were glowing—glowing like the lantern—and colored like a summer sky. 

The spirit remembered the sky and could have wept for the beauty of it.

He was not overly large or strong, his muscles lean but spare beneath the snug embrace of leather armor. With his slender legs and small feet, the man's physique was not unlike that of the dancers the spirit had once watched spin across a ballet stage, but given the knives strapped to his vest, the spirit knew the stranger used his dexterity for a far deadlier purpose. 

The man turned and the glass lantern suspended above him by a creature of wisps and impressions turned with him, catching the spirit in its influence. 

The void blurred his outline and sketched black lines across his skin.

"Oh," the stranger as he caught sight of her. "My, to think I'd be found by a spirit whilst in the middle of my search for one." His gaze took in every aspect of her, and the spirit realized she had hands and feet and a body and even a face, though she didn't know what she looked like. "Your soul is remarkably strong to have remained so intact here. I could make use of you." 

The spirit didn't know what he meant.

Sensing her confusion, the stranger extended one fair hand in her direction. "I am the Wanderer of the Far Vale," he said with a tip of his head. "Come with me, spirit."

She wasn't sure she should take that proffered hand, but his eyes were the color of the sky and she wanted to see it again, to know it again, and so the spirit drifted closer to the stranger bathed in the lantern's light, her hand tentatively stretched toward his.

The shadows tapered about the light's ring wavered, roiling like a turbulent sea as the man's eyes snapped to what lay behind the spirit, alarmed. Heat spilled through the cloying chill of the void and filled the spirit with vigor she hadn't known existed. An arm cinched about her middle and she was lifted up—up into those painted shadows, away from the stranger's lovely eyes.