The Academy: is that what they're calling it now?

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

He stands silent and still as a stone sentry unmarked by years.

The night ebbs around him as a living entity; it prowls, cold and familiar. If he is comfortable there, it does not seem to matter; if he even perceives his surroundings as anything but the desert he has left, it does not show. Even when she steps so close to him – and he, unseen, hidden, stands amongst the trees like something born of the earth itself – he does not seem to acknowledge her.

Perfect equilibrium; perfect stillness; dead.

But he knows, regretably, that she will feel him – not because he gives any signals of ‘aliveness’ in this pregnant night, but because of the heat that emanates from him like waves, invisible and overwhelming as a furnace mouth, rather hard to ignore in the otherwise pleasant summer night.

He can feel her, too, a presence in the edges of perception, dark and stalking as the night that moves around them.

Things are alive, his seer-father often says, all of them.

Well. It doesn’t mean he has to care.

leto
of sandworms and fire;