Dreams of Imahken

Of truly wise mind has nothing he hates.

 It seemed sudden, how the days slipped away and Illus found himself nearing the end of summer, when the comet would arrive and rivers would dry. When the new world would bear down on Imahken and never relent.

"Is she still on your mind?" Ciun tapped her toes against the water at the shaded edge of the lake, lightly mimicking the "plish plash" sounds a few times before turning her attention to the young man seated beside her.

Illus fell out of a daydream, fishing rod in one hand, the ring fumbling between his fingers in the other. "Oh, I just fuss with this when I'm bored," he lied, frustrated that Anilee still lingered in his head.

"When you're bored and missing her?" She tapped the back of his hand with ease.

He sighed, Ciun's constant prying like pins on his skin. He hardly noticed at first until she had picked him apart. Making light of it was the only way he avoided falling into self pity. "It's hard to say. It's more like... hmm. Do you ever feel like you're just not going anywhere in life? Like you're stuck in the same place and everyone is moving on without you?"

Her lighthearted expression fell flat and the mask turned out to the lake, then the mountain that was once a flourishing temple, the trees which had grown over her home, then herself, static in time. "No, what's that like?"

Illus smirked guiltily. "Nevermind it, I didn't mean to-"

Ciun couldn't fight the corner of her mouth down. "No, please, enlighten me about this feeling that I've somehow missed out on in my short life."

He pocketed the ring and chuckled away from her. "It's like that pit in the bottom of your stomach," he glanced at Ciun, who was nodding along, acting like it was all new information. "You find out your younger sister is married and going to be well on with her life while you're still hung up on a woman without a care for anything other than herself, leading you along aimlessly like a child. When you're stuck in a place where your only aspirations in life are working for a living, and working for a loving, so to speak- of which both would replace you in a heartbeat. And now you're imprisoned in a futile game with the odds stacked so far against you that it may be more lucrative to simply leap from the mountain. Even if I make it back... I'm back to it." Illus's eyes fell. "Sorry, it's an awfully dismal way of seeing things, I suppose."

The mask turned to the ground for a moment as Ciun lifted sand and watched it fall. "Yet you still persist. Why is that?"

"No matter how thin those odds are, they slowly grow the more I act according to my will. I had next to no chance, infinitesimally small- if at all- before you agreed to help me. But there is a way forward, and as long as I know it's there, I'll always try to find it."

She laid back in the sand. "Then what's there to worry about?"

"How it goes, obviously. I don't have the luxury of returning to life when I am gravely injured. I want to prepare myself for any possible obstacle."

"Do you think you're prepared?"

"As much as I can be."

"Then what's worrying going to do besides sour the present?"

"As I said," he pulled his line back and recast, "what home will look like, who might be coming, what I left behind... it's all approaching so quickly."

"Is that why your eyes sag even after I lent you my mountain getaway?"

He gritted his teeth. No response.

"Hmm," she propped herself up on an arm and turned to him. "I was in a similar position a while ago."

"A while as in a year or a while as in before my civilization had begun?"