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Jael submerges Last Resort in the water, the fluorescent blood curling and drifting down in a swirly green melange. Behind her, a towering beast slain—a mangled pile of horns, fangs, and legs. A job well-done, though she doesn’t take satisfaction in it.
She’d overestimated how far this hunt would take her, and now she’s back. Not back ‘home’—if such a thing even exists—but certainly within the realm of ‘somewhere’ and ‘oh Sentinels why’. These southern reaches are unfamiliar to her, the Arathian meddling forcing the clan farther than ever from their ancestral lands, away from the whims of imperial dominion—but its trees? These trees she’d know them everywhere, in winter and spring. Hearty and fallen. The Forest of Brennath stretches on and on beyond the horizon. And now she has to make choices.
Should she bother, for a visit? What would she even say? It’s not as if it’d be like her to crawl beside her parents, begging for a love that was never unconditionally given. Most likely she’d snark her way into a brawl, though she’s hoping to be banished for life. (There's a flash of Varyn’s disapproving frown, indicting her for her sins). Easier to avoid shuffling her feet around the problem if she’s not allowed to step near it at all. Or dancing, dancing around. Whatever.
Anyways. Choices.
She doesn’t miss her clan, but she misses the forest, and the clan is the forest, or so her father used to say. Her father said a lot of things—she didn’t pay attention to many of them.
It’s not just a dilemma for the sake of a dilemma, either. When Cenric picked her up, her parents were expecting their second in a few months. She didn't get to learn their name, or what they now purport themself to be, by this point in life—but perhaps that was the point. They’d be in their late teens by this point, older than her parents ever bothered to keep her around, so she imagines a smattering of scenarios where they were their child and she wasn’t. She prefers not to think of them as her replacement, however much her parents do. She prefers not to imagine them smoothly stringing the same bow she fumbled a thousand times.
She prefers not to, but she does.
She likes Aeran, but that's a charged liking. Aeran likes her, but she's unsure what that means for him. This is different. This is family, her little sibling—and, after the Spire, she’d do anything for a family again.
It's a pull she’s never quite known how to articulate. Not now, not with Aeran, but it typically goes like this: half of her, the aeda, wings outstretched and reaching for what should be. Half of her, the human, grounded in caution and cynicism, pulling down. Her own conjured up Calanthan wall—tearing her all up.
Suppressing a grimace, Jael picks at her reflection in the stream as if she could will it into becoming someone other than herself. Maybe then she wouldn't be such a coward.
The rustling of bushes and footsteps snaps her back on guard; squirrel-quick, she climbs by the nearest tree, perching herself by a thick branch, nature’s best impression of a balcony. From then on, two things happen in rapid succession.
First, a curious little creature hops into vision: a brown rabbit with pitch-black eyes, sniffing at air. It turns around, debating whether to retrace its steps or burrow underground—
An arrow embeds it against the trunk. Clean shot, though not as clean as Aeran’s.
Secondly, a man appears into view, roughly her age. He’d pass as any other stranger if not for the shock of ginger hair framing his face in bizarre angles. She vaguely recalls the boy from one of her childhood lessons, S-something. The Something Boy. Each were meant to hunt down a bird big enough to feed a family of four for a night, to emblazon themselves as providers for the clan. She had fumbled her shot. He hadn’t.
He kneels beside the rabbit, and gingerly but nonchalantly picks it up, another hunt in a long string of hunts, all the same. His expression hardly changes—she understands his dispassion, perhaps, better than anyone else. You get used to the blood, the unsatisfying whirl of violence. Different prey, identical lessons. Everything can become mundane with enough trial and error.
Wayfarers are all rather mundane, she's found. Not in the eyes of most mortals, of course—but within the greater confines of the world, they exist just as anyone else. They're born with nothing or everything, or somewhere in-between. They love and hate. They hurt and are hurt. They die forgotten or storied, as every forebear before them.
She flashes back to Last Resort, and what it means for her. What it means to write nothing, or become something. There has to be a something for her eventually, right?
Deep within her thoughts, her foot brushes against a stray offshoot. The Something Boy tenses, keen eyes peering around him, and for a second, he squints at the branches—just as Jael becomes the very definition of a freeze gut reaction. By this moment, she might as well be a Wayfarer-shaped lump of bark.
There's a saying, about a bird and a worm. And she is half-bird on a technicality. She could jump down, have an awkward chat, face the music—seize the moment. At most he’d rebuff her, standoffish, but allow her to accompany him out of respect for her roots, however removed she feels from them.
She could come back to see what's changed, if there's something worth salvaging. Or if she should just at last take the very consideration out of the shelf and toss it in a garbage pile.
She could do all of those things, but she doesn't. The boy turns away—convinced of a trick of the wind—and begins strolling towards, presumably, what is meant to be the current encampment. His silhouette soon fuses with the treeline's and disappears from sight.
Jael drops down, now. Deliberates for a moment too long—then turns her back to the forest, because she's still a coward.