Amends

Chapter 9: Retry

Following the nightmare, Ingressus is concerned for Amantius' safety and tries his best to send him home; but Amantius refuses to move

Even his scaring tactics don't work on the small boy, and he is left with little choice

Author's note: we finally start seeing a bit more of Ingry's normal personality appearing - his strength and his inner canon!Ingressus XD

we love Ingry

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A light sunbeam slipped through the bare branches of the trees and tapped Ingressus' eyelids only a matter of hours after Amantius had awoken him from his brutal nightmare, and he fluttered them open as they laid heavy over his sight, his vision blurry and irritated. The first things he noticed were the blades of grass flattened beside him as if they had only recently been relieved of the pressure of another person resting there. He untangled himself from his cloak as it had twisted around one of his arms as he laid on his side, and he removed it completely before sitting upright and sweeping his matted hair out of his face. He felt rough – as though he had run for miles before passing out; his chest ached, and his lungs felt empty and depleted of raw energy.

He had not a good night at all; but he already knew that after his lucid dream had captured him within his own mind, beating his subconscious to within an inch of its life. He felt it as though it had happened in reality, and he checked to reassure himself that it hadn't – that no additional inflictions lingered. He even rubbed his neck, just in case.

With a quick pandiculation, he found himself to be as comfortable as he could get for being where he was – still in the woods near the mine network. He simply counted himself lucky that no-one had stumbled upon him in the night. In fact, as uncomfortable as he was, he was grateful that he still awoke on the grass where he had settled the night before and not in some cell or in the back end of a cave somewhere, as that would spark more questions than answers; and strangely, it had nothing to do with Achillean. If anything, he would be more worried about the other clans, although given their track record against the Voltaris, he figured they would kill him in his sleep and be done with it – especially when the Tidesinger was more of a concern to them at this point.

Just as Ingressus was about to clamber to his feet and stretch his legs, he spotted a pair of feet dangling just off to the side of him and in a tree, not too high up that they wouldn't be spotted, but not so low that they could simply jump down on their own. He glanced up and shielded his eyes against the rising sun to spot Amantius perched calmly on the thick girth of a wide branch, looking anxiously down at the Voltaris; but he wasn't looking at Ingressus himself. Actually, he was fixated on the many inflictions that littered his skin – the burn scars that adorned his lower front, the scratches and deep cuts that hovered near his ribs and the remnants of long-lasting bruises around his waist and neck. He didn't like to stare, but he couldn't believe his tiny eyes when Ingressus removed his cloak fully for the first time. He was mesmerised by, not just the completion of the Master's markings, but the full scale of what he had to put up with.

Of course, Amantius assumed that, like the other red Ardoni he had heard about, he was part of the Great War and that was where all the bodily inflictions had come from. He knew nothing about what had really happened, or he might have been able to make the link between Ingressus' persistent nightmares and his scars – how each one cemented a different part of him, a history that he would never tell of his own volition.

When Ingressus caught Amantius' gaze, he quickly averted his own and pretended not to have noticed the small Nestoris staring, and he resumed sorting himself out for his next stage in searching for answers. He retrieved his cloak from the ground and quickly brushed it down, but as he patted the coarse fabric clean of dirt and dust from the grass, he stopped to ponder where Achillean's cloak might be. He knew that it once belonged to Ardorus Nestoris – Achillean's father – and he always knew that there was a slight attachment to the cloth even though he knew of Ardorus' harsh ways with his son; but he also knew why.