It was almost funny, how things like these tended to work more often than they didn’t. How two outlanders would find one another on chance, wind and fire, in a place neither of them belonged. it was almost like a cruel joke to Dustfinger, but that implied this world had a sense of humor, and that’d be very sorely mistaken. ━━ this world was tacky and grey, not quite sticky but not quite smooth but enough to trip you up, it was hollow and soundless at once and you couldn’t hear your own footfalls or your heartbeat here like you could back home, like the world, greedily, swallowed them whole. this world had no dreadful sense of humor the way his did, where misfortune laughed and bad luck tittered in light fiendish giggling as it tracked on the shadows of your heels, this world was just dread and dried crop and full of nothing. ━━━ so its funny, that coincidence played like this.
he’s been using the word coincidence more than chance or fate these days. this world didn’t have that, didn’t have luck, didn’t have much of anything, it had no life, and coincidence was something lifeless to him. he’d first heard it off the lips of a passerby with bright hair and dark eyes, someone that didn’t matter just as much as him. on the streets of this world, he meant very, very little.
the air had been sickly hot for months, forests barely broad enough to set the heat off-tilt and never could he stay in them long, the fortresses of cities pulled at him in the way hunger does, less because he hungers to be there, but because there’s only a handful of ways he’d learnt how to navigate this world, and most of them involved money. rare were you to find something that didn’t. ━━━ this was what led him here, bright clay-brick buildings almost glowing in the summer sun, heat bouncing off itself like a furnace. Dustfinger had tolerated worse before, but he couldn’t help but think his home to be cooler, more bearable than here. ( always more bearable… ) where great constructs of concrete seemed especially made for scalding those inside… he knew, in part, homesickness will taint everything, nostalgia too, but he’d suffer any climate if he could return to that, return to━
the abrupt jut from brick, scribbled on haphazardly with chalk, made him twitch. his head snapping to look at him in such a sudden movement it could almost be a flinch. the wind pushed his hair back, blonde and unruly threatening to jab him in the eye. one hand occupied with a little map ( he’d been trying to find the best place to perform… ), the other came up to brush the strands back.
he couldn’t lie, the wind was nice, a temptation had been to agitate the boy further on some of the more unbearable days since he’d decided to tag along, but knew well enough not to irritate the dead.
his scarred lips quirked at the snarled words, and his eyes flicked back down to the map. thoughtlessly, he noted he could feel Gwin stirring gently in his coat pocket. she’d be hungry too when she woke…
“ That may be so, tempest. “ Dustfinger had taken to calling him by that name since he started following him. He wondered, absent-mindedly, when the boy would grow tired and bored. Not long, he figured. “ The usual is the unusual. More concerned about their own doing with their own fast little world than you or I. Til you make a spectacle of it. “
he casted Morro a glance away from the small plastic-y feeling map, a smile edging at his mouth. Dustfinger had a strange smile, one that felt mocking, egotistical, or just awkward. you could never tell which, if any.
“ After all, isn’t that how you found me? “
he smiled proper, then, in the way that stretched the scarring across one eye in a twisted, cruel way that caught the shadows and ridges of his face that made it look worse than it was, stubble edging at his jaw. he started walking again then, smile dropped as easy as it’d come, and if you looked closely, you could see the slight wriggling of a full-looking coat pocket.
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