The Academy: come one, come all; [any]

“They tried and failed, all of them?”
“Oh, no.” She shook her head. “They tried and died.”

In the end it happens because it has to.

It is inevitable. They are there, they are coy, they flirt – and, one night, it isn’t flirtation and it isn’t coyness; instead, it is something else – something searing hot, like passion is meant to be, and equally powerful.

In the end he is alone as he holds their son inside, because some things are transient and some things are meaningless, some things change and some things are brittle like glass.

Maybe he is transient (mortal) and meaningless (hidden) and fragile (like a newborn babe), but in the end he endures, because some things have to happen and so they do.

When he first feels the taste of fire in his lips (exquisite, beautiful, familiar) he understands the nature of transience; the sand melts and flows into him, pooling in argentine rivers in the nooks and crannies of

He stands with glass coating his body like a mantle or armour, a temperature no body should resist, with the delight of extremophiles, and he smiles at the beautiful things he creates, pulsing and pumping and boiling from the sands.

He moves when it’s dark, because even after two years he hesitates to be seen: to be seen is to be known and to be known is anathema. He knows this, because he is aware of his strange genesis and how unnatural – if by unnatural you mean biologically impossible – it is.

It is this dislike to be seen, to be known, that leads him through the copses of the Academy with scarcely a breath: the toils of his father’s duty do not belong to him, the ruthlessness of body and soul and the stark clarity, visibility, that such a task brings. He is no more scholar than his seer-father is, but needs must; so is the way of the world and he abides to it with a grace bespoken of weariness.

In the shades, unseen – or, at least, so he hopes – he is little more than the others: a faceless colt fading to monochrome, quiet and silent and waiting.

Patience is a virtue and a skill, and few know it as Leto does.

leto
of sandworms and fire;