a promise kept / a home in ruins day 6
Nov 18, 2024 18:43:43 GMT -5
Post by gamemaker kelsier on Nov 18, 2024 18:43:43 GMT -5
s t o n e k n i g h t .
He hadn't known what to do after leaving the watch tower.
All these years spent alone, he's always at least had a sense of purpose. At the beginning, all he had left of himself were his memories. When even those began to be swallowed by the stone, the one thing that he never let go of was the promise that he had made.
The knight walks through the rubble, the castle in emaciated bricks at his feet. Grass springs green through holes in the floor and ivy eats at the stone pillars that once held a stained roof made of glass over the inner courtyard. Shards lay in pieces in the dirt at his feet, their corners softened with age.
He shoots off along a worn dirt path, once a slim corridor, then down a set of stairs, stepping lightly over missing rows. He emerges out into a wide walkway, the castle's cracked marble now the rough cobble of the town, and he stops there.
The street is littered with statues, and the knight recognises every single one of them.
The withered husk of the soldier lays still in the watch tower.
There is nothing left to protect.❦
He does what any man does when he is feeling lost.
Atlas goes home.
His eyes are shut as he walks, his feet know where he goes. He's taken these routes so many times that there are grooves in the path from the weight of his stone boots.
But it's different now.
He can feel the press of the earth rising to meet his heel, taste the air as it moves past his lips and shiver in the brightness of the cold morning. Sweat drips down the back of his neck and the knight is keenly aware of it. Hair falls across his forehead, tickles the skin there and the knight pushes it back. Feather-light softness against his finger tips.
He had forgotten about textures, the feeling of tree bark, the petal of a sky flower, satin-soft to the touch. The slow give of its membrane between the pressure of his fingers and the cool spill of the flower's lifeblood, light blue smeared across the back of his hand.
It takes him some time to reach the edge of the clearing. No longer formed of stone, his body has needs and they stall him. As he gets closer, he leaves the beaten path, the sky flowers parting in front of him to let him through. There's a stream on his way, he remembers it and it is there still, where he saw it last. The water tastes like home.
And when he steps out from under the shade of the trees, into the light, the mist of the morning stays behind in the dusky shade cast by the forest. Home stands silent, the windows dark. The doorway is gone, long rotted away from the stone in the many years it stayed here hidden.
Atlas does not move to go inside, nor does he turn to go around back to the garden.
He does not know yet if he can.
