Chapter Text
Lio Fotia.
His name carries a weight, a burden, a blessing. Introductions are unnecessary but they roll off his tongue mindlessly. His thoughts are elsewhere, surveying the damage and destruction around him. The smell of the dust, the burn in his lungs, it almost feels right.
The taste, coppery and almost nostalgic, flits over his senses. He isn't aware of the tracks on his cheeks, clearing the dust and dirt from his bruises. The body's senses heightened by the lack of the burning inside, he feels but not as himself.
In the sun's light, he's reborn. As his comrades emerge battered and shaking in the wind, as his mind flies back to the moments he'd shared with each and every Burnish he'd met... He's overwhelmed. His vision starts to blur, the sky and the ground melding together in colors so vivid, he'd never really noticed anything outside of his own color. Outside of the belonging, the warmth, the fear.
He realizes the taste on the wind, remembers the flames under his hand flicker and die as he'd tried so desperately to save those who'd lost their fire. The irony almost makes him chuckle, a wet sob wrenching itself from his suddenly fragile frame. The unfairness, the sun rising without the knowledge of those he'd watched perish before this dawn, the loneliness...
Ashes on his tongue, and a gaping maw in his chest, Lio Fotia finally lets himself unravel.
And despite that ache, despite all he'd endured, hands still reach out to help him stand. Hold him back from the brink, back from that place he so desperately wishes to chase after, to where his power returned.