sunday ♪ take us home
After years of exile, something about riding through Elenia gave Martel an unpleasantly familiar feeling between his shoulderblades. All of the bridges had been burned, and he didn't belong any more; he fancied the land knew it as well as he did. His thrice-damned 'traveling companions' didn't make the trip any more palatable - if anything, less - and when they were encamped, he left them to their own devices a while, following a path he'd never realized he wouldn't forget.
The woods they'd stopped in were on the edge of the estate he'd sold years before, in a rush to leave. He hadn't been intimately familiar with the place since he was a boy and a novice, but he knew it well enough. There were differences; time would do that. The kennels were gone, and the stables had been expanded. It seemed to him (in the evening and from the distance) more lively than it had been when it was his family's home; he'd been largely absent after his novitate began, with Romiar and Veleda always a self-contained couple.
They'd matched each other, he reflected; once he'd been grateful that they were already gone before his dishonour, when they could still be proud of who their son had become, but by the time he had his feet on what used to be their land again it was a passing thought already long since scoured from his mind. It didn't matter any more. With his hand on a tree that Petrana had claimed for her own by shoving him in the chest with her feet until he swung (upside down, indignant like a ruffled cat), he thought of his grandfather. The last true Pandion in their history; that legacy had died with him, and any hope of continuing it would eventually die with Martel.
Thoughts he wasn't having interrupted by movement, he made an irritable sound and turned away, walking back through the trees without bothering to properly acknowledge Adus. "When we leave, burn it," he said, shortly. "Try not to attempt creativity, Adus, it only embarrasses me."