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Sorasa pursed her lips. “Do Elders go deaf?”
In reply, he whistled again. It was a low, haunting sound to echoagainst the rocks, and perhaps carry into the mountain heights. More birdcall than melody, carrying no tune she recognized. Like the hoot of an owl, but deeper.
“It’s how we Vedera find each other in mortal lands,” he explained, whistling again. Then he paused, head angled toward the snows. The hoot echoed without any response and Dom shuffled on.
As they walked, he brushed his hands here and there, touching boulders carpeted with moss or tide pools swirling with brine. Sorasa was careful not to slip over the wet stones, but Dom paid them no mind, leaping with his usual Elder grace. And something more.
This land was familiar to him like nothing else. Sorasa had never seen him so at ease, like a captured hawk finally returned to the sky.
“I patrolled the southern coast in my youth,” he said, as if sensing her thoughts. His fingers brushed a copse of purple heather, stubbornly clinging to life between the rocks.
Sorasa tried to picture him, younger, smaller, more enamored of the world. It felt impossible.
“And what do you consider youth?” she wondered, settling in to walk next to him.
He shrugged his broad shoulders. “I suppose I was more than a century and a half old then.”
One hundred and fifty years old, and still young, Sorasa thought, balking. She could not wrap her mind around the years of Elders, and the sprawl of time they occupied upon the realm. Not to mention their relative indifference to the world as it spun around them, shifting and changing and breaking apart.
And Dom is the best of them, the first to fight, the last to lose faith.
“It’s difficult to believe you are the least annoying of your kin,” she muttered.
The wind blew again and she wished for something better than the salt-stiff blanket around her shoulders, salvaged from the wreckage on shore.
Dom surveyed her with a strange look, his eyes losing a bit of their glimmer. Whatever warmth he carried went cold, the embers snuffed out.
“I suppose that’s true now, with Ridha gone,” he said tightly.
Sorasa swallowed around a sudden lump in her throat. She cursed her poor attempt at a compliment.
“I did not mean to speak of Ridha,” she said, only for Dom to quicken his pace.
After a few strides, he turned to sneer at her, walking backward over the rocky ground.
“What is it you mortals say when you are in grave pain but don’t want to admit it?” His voice echoed harshly off the cliffs, loud enough to overtake the crash of waves. “Oh yes.I’m fine.”
A dozen sharp retorts rose up but she bit them back, clenching her teeth. Dom still mourned the loss of his cousin, and Sorasa could not blame him. She remembered her last glimpse of the Elder princess, tall in her green armor, black hair like a standard, a greatsword in hand. The immortal woman turned back to guard Corayne’s escape, and Dom went with her, to hold off the horrors of a Spindle as best they could. The dragon roared overhead, the Infyrna hounds yelped and burned. The undead marched in their unending rows. And a black knight rode through them all, his blade a merciless shadow.
It was a miracle Dom survived at all.
“Very well,” she muttered. “I am useless at that sort of talk anyway.”
Dom did not relent.
“I know,” he answered. “The last time you experienced any feeling at all, you stopped speaking for two months.”
His pain was suddenly her own. It lanced down her spine, the edge of her vision going white. Though the shipwreck beach was far behind them, she saw bodies again. Not in Tyri uniforms, but Amhara leathers, their faces familiar, their wounds still bleeding.
Sorasa wanted to retch.
“I’m fine,” she forced out.
Dom’s lips twisted, forming his usual scowl. With that, he turned around, and they fell back into their rhythm.
Slowly, the tide washed in, forcing them higher up the slopes, until the way became too perilous for even Sorasa to traverse. They would have to wait for the water to roll out again, clearing the path forward. Part of her wondered if she might be dashed against the cliffs, the waves breaking only a few yards away. But Dom showed no such worry, and it put her at ease.
He stood at the edge of the slope, on an outcropping over the churning ocean. To the west, the sun descended, glimpsed through gaps in the clouds. It streaked red and bloody, giving the air a strange scarlet haze.
