Sand Castles

"There in the world has been enough
Enough of dying, enough of tears
Changes come and we must, as creatures
Go with it yet remember to not

Forget what has gone before.
The before leads to the now
And the salt leads to the healing of wounds."





The outline was established.

Renne crawled along the beach as his thoughts turned from one thing to another.

He knew this beach like few other places he'd been before. The Glassed Sorrows hadn't been explored much. Veldri Niahar'dro had only a few familiar places and it was, besides, long-fallen by now. The Inne had returned, for that he daily prayed his thanks. It was one of the few places he knew as well as this beach.
And he knew this beach had seen enough of tears.

The path was traced again and again. When Renne reached the shore and that marble carving, he stopped to investigate it. His fingers ran along weather-worn etchings -- the sea, salt and sand hadn't been kind to this but the monument was still what it was intended as. And when he turned away from it to complete the triangular path, Renne's mind turned in on itself.
It was time that the old met the new.
That the past with its angels, was its glory and the past with its demons was buried. Learned from. Grown out of. It was time that something living was born here.
He thought about that as his hands met his wooden outline on the ground.

-I am here. I have been here for a long time.
I have what Humans call a name and I have Solidity. My journeys have been long, hard and often, painful. And much of that time, I was alone.
In many ways, I will always be alone, as only the last of a species can be alone.
I am not totally cut off as I used to be. Not as I was in the Era Before. I know the ground beneath me. I have witnessed it thriving and I shall do so again.-

He spoke mostly to himself and to whatever gods might listen to him. Renne came to sit within his outline on the ground and remember what he knew. When the sun came lower in the sky and shone on his left shoulder, he picked himself up into a crawl and nodded quietly.

The outline was established.

Sand Castles
Burgeoning Dream

"You can tell the sun in his jealous sky
That we walked in fields of gold."
--Fields of Gold; Sting





It was time to live.

He'd gotten back to that stretch of beach as a rain had begun to fall. Rain was an odd thing with him; sometimes it was all right and sometimes it was a loathsome thing.
Right now, he didn't know which it was.

The sand was familiar beneath his skin and his outline was still there.

Intact.

Alive.

Renne traced his familiar route and let his mind roam over the thoughts of his most recent days. True, the creature remained trapped in this unnatural human shape but he was determined to turn it at least into a learning experience if that was possible.
The outline was still only that but his mind turned from within and thought of what that outline meant. It was meant as a beginning, something that wouldn't die as easily as nearly everything else in the city. The outline was an echo of an age-old lesson.
If you want something done, you must do it yourself.

This lesson was known intimately, for it went hand in hand with how he had lived for much of his life. He survived on his own. He had learned to avoid placing too much trust in other beings -- such only lead to the death of things.
The outline was the beginning. His beginning.

Beginning.

The word reverberated in his head and brought with it memory.

It was his beginning and her link. Johnathan's name whispered in his mind and Renne's outline took on another meaning alongside the one it already had. This was not just his -- this was his and 'Nathan's and Oobie's and it held the secrets of the past.
And the hope of the future.
Renne completed ten rounds on his familiar route and when he stopped at his outline, he went into its middle and sat on the ground. With the emerging sun banishing the rain, he began to sing the wind a story.

He told the wind of the Glassed Sorrows. He told of Veldri Niahar'dro and his beginnings in Rhy'Din itself and managed to tell of the demon that took out his then-heart (literally) without flinching. Other tales were told, of people who disappeared, some who came back and some who didn't.
Of Archie. Cinder. 'Nathan. The Aventeals and later, Stephen, Audra and Mishka.

And then he told the wind his dreams.