Note: Valeria Thracius, Corradhin Cole, and Bellona Viellana have all decided to rejoin us. Their previous entries have been posted and will be scored for half the number of points. Rankings will be changed to reflect their additions.
☠Milo Periander☠
At the end of a game, Milo knows, the board is reset. The cards are shuffled. Perhaps new teams are chosen and the lines are redrawn, pieces put properly in their place to wait for the wheel to spin again. The spectators decide if they'd like to sit in for another round and the coaches search for a new strategy; dice and dealers await their turn.
But not all games are started again; some end there, the outcome final, and those last moves are left to define how the players played, revealing the parts of themselves they want most to remain hidden. Human nature- it's in us to do anything to win. It's in us to regret, and look back only to see the things we could've done for a better result. Those with hindsight never leave the past, and the past so easily catches and haunts.
Milo wanders from the lava and finds himself, ultimately, surrounded by a lush blue. He pauses where he stands for a moment, thinking; he hasn't had time, until now, to really think. It's been battle and blood and an irreversible amount of hours spent running, and suddenly he's focused on how smoothly his breath spills past his lips. Red, fair.
He thinks, there's no reason for me to have come back.
Streaks of shimmering blue snake through the cave walls like an electric current, emitting a soft glow to embrace him, very unlike the heated air that'd burned him in the volcano. Sweat still lines his forehead, his hair matted and curly with moisture, the deep orange scruff of his beard like sandpaper on skin. It may be night and it may be day, but the dimness of the water wades like an early morning, undisturbed, no ripples to wake up the room.
Then, silence. Eerie, vacant. The only entrance to the cave is wide behind him and he stares at it, pausing long enough to find comfort in the fact no one is coming. Perhaps it's an intermission of the game, but Milo knows he's not that lucky.
He walks to the pool of water, as large as a lake and shallow as a river. It reflects a hazy and turquoise image of him, and again he finds himself staring and forgetting to think. Just emptiness, a hollow head filled with blood that could be poured away in seconds, leaving crimson stains among the obsidian rock beneath his feet. End game.
But he resumes time with a short exhale. His fingers come to pinch the bridge of his nose and he sighs, turning in search of a stone he could possibly sit on. A drip of water to his right, a crackling of rocks above him. He wipes his forehead (clean around the mouth, bile, it's vile) and leans against a wall, his body aching and wet and tired. He feels like a drowned version of himself, his lungs slipped a vial of oxygen only when he needs it most, and the rest of his life is spent breathless, wanting the air like air wants the sun. Sun, Milo thinks. Sun, sun, sun.
When he pulls his shirt over his head, the bite of chilled wind overcomes his chest. A slight breeze brushes about the enclosed area (impossibility, near and dear) and he shivers. It feels like ice on glass, his body still sticky with sweat, craving to rid itself of dirt and debris. He dips his clothes into the water, wrings them out, and lays them on the flattest surface he can find. Then he goes back, sans clothing and desperate for the leisure of swimming clean (clean, sober) and wetting his hair.
His toes dip into the blue slowly. It's sharp, climactic, and he hisses as if to silence a scream. It seems the liquid is one degree shy of freezing over, and he expects frost to cling to his toenail as he pulls it out. There's nothing; silence tilts and drifts.
