The thought K'piru had not finished in the tent K'ile had hidden them away in coalesced into action a day and a half later. During this brief time, the bereaved mother drifted in a shell-shocked silence as K'ile, struggling in his own mind and with his own body, did all he could to anchor her. The food he had brought remained largely untouched, the water drank only out of absolute necessity. As the hours ticked by, the air in the tent grew dense with thoughts unspoken and tears that had run dry.
The air had cooled significantly at some point, suggesting to K'piru as she pulled herself slowly to some measure of external awareness that it was night. She smelled K'ile before she saw him, the scent sparking a pain in her chest that left her breath short and her eyes burning uselessly. He lay next to her on his side, body still save for a faint sign of breathing.
He seemed asleep, or unconscious.
Her limbs ached and protested, joints moving with stiff reluctance as she slowly unfolded her legs beneath her to stand in the tent. Small tremors shook her, echoes of a grief that still clouded her thoughts. For a time, she simply stood still in the tent, trying to ignore K'ile's scent, the flashes of memory, of her daughters' smiles or Thalen's warm hands. She tried to ignore the fire that raged as a nightmare in her mind and that left a pit deep in her belly charred black and empty.
K'piru had wanted K'ile's comforts to be enough, but the pain was not receeding, and even his simple presence seemed only to make it worse. The guilt that hazy thought came paired with nearly brought her to her knees again, but instead she stumbled forward sightlessly until she was, very suddenly, standing outside under a sky obscured by a shadow of smoke and dust. She didn't remember walking, but once she started, she found she couldn't stop.
Like a ghost, K'piru slipped wearily around the edge of the small camp, expression dazed and lost and desperate. In the twisting of her chest, that fiery grip around her heart, she found only a need to escape. Her daughters voices haunted her, and she turned many times to her left or right at a familiar weight at her side only to find Thalen's memory fade and burn. These delirious thoughts pestered her at a frenetic pace, dogged her every step until she wanted to drop into the sand, scream, and simply die. Her body did not obey this want, however, and through the shroud of ghosts around her, the only other way she could think to flee those faces and smells and memories was to leave entirely.
In the middle of the night, without a single word to the rest of the remaining tribe, K'piru simply disappeared. If one checked later, they would find a chocobo missing - the eldest and least valuable - as well as a small portion of water, though no food.
***
Hunger had caught up to him. By the time he'd tried to eat anytihng, shivering and pale, his body was ready to collapse, and so it had. K'ile lay still in an exhausted haze at K'piru's side, taking solace at least in the fact that she was fairing better than he was. As long as he survived, and she did better than he did, then she would be just fine. He stared up at her, but all he saw was shadows. All he heard was his own breath.
K'ile concentrated on the scent of her, as it wavered in the tent, as the stink of death and fire seeped in and tried to obscure it. He held the scent at the front of his mind, and for maybe a few seconds, he actually pondered why he so feverishly needed to reach K'piru, and way she was so intangible. The answer he found strangled him, though, smothering out his thoughts and senses until all that was left was inky numbness and the strong, all-important scent of K'piru at his side.
The scent decieved him, though, for it lingered longer than she did. When he was finally able to stir from his state of exhaustion, his body's desperate pleas for food, water and sleep were like distant echoes that he just barely heard, and ignored outright. K'piru's scent had aged. She was gone.
The Tia was a pathetic thing tracking that scent around camp, picking out the shaman's footprints in the sand. She'd gone this way, then there, where was she going? To him, there was nothing else around him. There were no tents, no tribe, the smell of fire and the ehat of the desert were just the sensations of an empty world.
It wasn't difficult, once he'd tracked her to the chocobos, to discern what she had done. He didn't even need to count them. The mingling smells and the tracks in the sand told him everything he needed to know.
He lingered in his haze, for a time. His body was shivering. He'd stopped sweating, dehydrated. There was a voice of reason in his mind, shaking him, telling him to go find food.
K'ile wasn't the best at riding chocobos. He hated the animals so greatly that he refused to even take one on hunt. But everything was upside-down right now. Any sense of comfort or reason, even basic needs like food, were now secondary to this new, bizarre need that he did not completely understand. He thought, it probably wasn't even about K'piru, and yet...
He'd taken the first Chocobo he'd been able to get his hands on, barely taking the time to throw a saddle on it, securing its straps with his shaking fingers, before he took off to follow K'piru. The desert around him was wounded, with vast black scars, but he onyl cared about the scent of K'piru and the chocobo she'd taken.
***
K'piru had found north, an easy task even in her half-delirious state thanks to decades of plotting the skies of Sagolii, and set the old, confused chocobo on its path. She had no real concept of what lied beyond the desert save for scattered stories of trading towns brought back by tribe members on their occasional forays for goods, but as she half lay over the chocobo's back, hands shaking around its reigns, K'piru found this didn't matter. She wouldn't stop in Thanalan. She knew it wouldn't be far enough.
For a brief moment, she wondered if she could find the battlefield K'ile had returned from, but no sooner had this thought skittered across her mind did she recoil from it. Against the backs of her eyelids, she saw the bodies of her daughters, of Thalen, splayed out on decimated ground and shriveled the same black as the corpses she had spent an endless week tending to already. Her stomach wrenched and she nearly toppled from the chocobo's back as she gagged back bile, then buried her face in the feathers ringing its neck. The beast chirped in confusion but continued on; she hadn't given it the signal to stop.
The dunes rolled by unnoticed by K'piru. At some point, the chocobo's pace slowed as it tired, and she became aware of a dull hunger pressing at the edges of her stomach. It had not seemed right to take much from the tribe, not even in her manic state, and she knew enough about the lay of the Sagolii to find her way to food of some kind when she needed it. But for now, the grief in her gut crowded out much of the hunger.
She didn't notice when the chocobo lifted and turned its head, sensing the approach of someone familiar.
There was no hesitation in K'ile's approach. He spurned his chocobo into a full run as he sensed himself nearing the source of the scent, and the younger, stronger chocobo caught up the K'piru's easily. Overcoming the summit of one final dune, K'ile's mount uttered a warble to alert him, and he urged it in the direction. He instructed it to ride faster, not slower, as they approached, and the only thing that stopped the two birds from colliding was the stubborn good sense of K'ile's Chocobo. It stopped and squawked, feet tearing up the sand, feathers on its neck rubbing against the feathers of the other bird.
"K'piru!" K'ile said, harsh and breathy, reaching out and taking hold of the reins of her bird. "What are you doing!?"
For several, long seconds, K'piru sat in confusion, hands hanging limp where they had once held the reins. Then that achingly familiar scent caught up to her senses, bringing with it memories that once had been warm and caring but now carried only fire and death. She cowered as though hiding from it, or K'ile's words, or K'ile himself.
"I can't," she whispered, voice cracking. The chocobo beneath her had stopped and had begun to exchange a few, quiet chirps with K'ile's, but K'piru tried to urge it forward. "It's too much. Just leave me... leave me be. It's better--" She could feel her throat clenching and her body wrapping around sobs, but she'd run out of tears a day ago. That didn't mean it hurt any less. But it was better. She was useless to the tribe like this, and she knew, without any shadow of doubt, that she could not overcome this. Not like she had overcome K'aijeen's loss. This was just too much.
His hand tightened on the reins of K'piru's chocobo. They tightened so his hand hurt, and his teeth ground. He could feel himself starving, but for everything except food. The woman felt far away, and she was getting farther. "That's not..." She didn't understand. She wasn't listening. "K'piru, there is nowhere to go. The world is barren. It is empty. And there's nothing in the tribe, either! There's just... us." He pulled against the leather, and looked down into the sand. "I could be everything K'thalen was, if you need me to be. I'll learn how."
"You can't!" K'piru nearly screamed into the empty night, and her thoughts flashed back to that singular, first moment - stifling heat, the shadows of a tent, and that grinning boy promising he wouldn't give away her secret, that he'd let her be what she wanted. Then that boy was wreathed in flame, his image shrouded in smoke, and there was nothing she could do. He had left her. Her daughters had left her. She was alone.
"You can't!" She repeated and turned her face to finally look at K'ile, eyes wide and shaking. "They're gone! Nothing--no one can replace... I can't be..." She could only hold the look for a few seconds before the sight of him became too much and, feeling utterly trapped with the ghosts closing in all around, she slid down the opposite side of her chocobo and dropped unsteadily into the sand. It wasn't rational. It wasn't reasonable. To anyone but K'piru, it would have been an act of stupity. But she could not be here. It was all she knew.
"I can," he said, but the words were uncertain and weak. "You just... Won't accept..." K'ile wrenched his hand free of the other chocobo's reins and threw his arm out angrily, "I'm not trying to replace anything! I'm not Thalen! But I know I can be enough if you'd just accept that! I'm alive! But that doesn't mean anything to you!"
She started to walk. The chocobo K'piru had taken turned its head to watch her and shifted its large feet in the sand anxiously. At his words, she flinched, hunched her shoulders and wrapped her arms about her stomach in a childish gesture. The tattered and dust-and-blood stained wrappings she word shook in a faint, brief breeze just like her voice shook when she spoke without looking at him, "It means..."
She swallowed. She should be glad K'ile had made it back. If not happy, then at least relieved. Maybe she could have been if his return had not also meant the absence of his brother. There was a keen guilt in that acknowledgement; K'ile didn't deserve resentment, didn't deserve the arrow of her grief and cowardice.
"It means you should go back to camp, and care for the others left alive," she finally managed. Her tone was low, defeated, lost. In a far corner of her mind, where the flames did not reach but for the press of thick shadow, a somber voice told her that whether she made it out of Thanalan or died in the desert didn't matter. At least she would escape.
"And what if I don't care about the others?" K'ile steered his chocobo towards her, causing more confusion in the older bird that she had abandoned. The thing warbled in bemusement and followed awkwardly. K'ile followed K'piru slowly, distantly, as though there were some reason to stay away from her. "What if you're the only thing left I care about? What if I'd rather go with you into that empty world than go back to the tribe alone?"
Squeezing her eyes shut until she saw small spots of light against the backs of her eyelids, bright flashes that echoed the seemingly sourceless explosions of flames that had battered the tribe to ashes, K'piru hesitated but did not stop her walking. She couldn't. Her legs moved without her conscious input, carrying her slowly away from the ghosts.
Then without warning she stopped, so suddenly that her body swayed forward before she jerked in place, spinning around to stare wide-eyed at K'ile. Her chest ached, heart pounding wildly against the cage of her ribs, the dull beat of blood mixing with the roar of flames in her ears. She wanted to flee and hide and cry and scream. Instead she found her voice tearing from her throat in a broken shout, "I can't keep you with me!" A blinding heat distorted her vision, and she leaned back, turned away, suddenly breathless. "I can't," she added smaller, quieter. "I need to go away. You need to..."
In a sudden bout of frustration, K'ile kicked himself off of his chocobo suddenly enough that the bird started in ran a short distance away. The Tia hit the sand heavily and reached out to grab K'piru by one arm. He considered, however briefly, forcing her to stay. He could hold her until she came to her senses, and she would come to her senses. She might die out here in the desert if she just walked off like this. Especially if she walked off like this.
"K'piru, we need each other. You want to run away, but you need to stay." He felt the muscles in his arm and hand lock down about his grip on her arm, his fingers numb. "Everything will be alright, if you stay. I promise."
"Please don't," the words shook from deep in her chest as she leaned away from K'ile, against the pull of his hand. She didn't want to hear his words, didn't want any more reminders what she was abandoning, what she had no choice in abandoning.Â
His scent pressed in all around her, suffocating. His voice merged with the warmer tones of Thalen's, and she cried out, suddenly frenetic in her attempts to get away. "Just leave me alone! I don't want you to--I need to go! I can't... Leave me to die if I so choose!"
Part of him tried to let go, but most of him couldn't. Just like his starving body was supposed to be seeking desperately after food, he was driven to hold onto her, to drag her back. "You choose to abandon home, and family. You won't be okay. I won't be okay! There is nothing! Why would you choose that?"
He pulled her towards him, a forceful gesture. "I'm not going to let you walk off and die. You wouldn't even make it out of the desert like this."
Wasn't that half of the point? If she died out here, if she made it out of the desert, out of Thanalan - it made no difference. The flames had held no pity for her daughters or Thalen; she would take none either. When he dragged her forward, K'piru brought her other hand up between them, palm flat against his chest as though to ward him away. Her face she turned away from him, denying his presence as much as she could.
"I don't need you," she choked out, shivering with overwhelming emotion. "I need my daughters. I need Thalen. I don't--not you. I need /them/, not you!" Her hand curled into a fist and she slammed it against K'ile's chest with her last cry.
K'ile let go of Antimony suddenly, releasing all the force with which she was pulling away, and said sternly, "You don't get to die."
Behind K'ile, both chocobos chuffed and chirped in agitation, sensing their riders' distress but unsure of the source. When K'ile released her, K'piru stumbled back, nearly falling into the sand. When her feet found purchase, she hunched away from K'ile, hugging herself.
How could she respond to that? Her mind churned, along with her stomach, and soon those ghosts of memories were vying for her attention once more. She couldn't bring herself to say that it wasn't his place to tell her such things, that if he had lost as much as she... but that wasn't fair. K'piru knew it wasn't fair, but it hurt too much to care. She shuddered and could only beg once again, down towards the sand, "Please, just let me go."
K'ile turned and took hold of the reins of both of the chocobo. His hair hid his features, and in the dark, his fire-red hair seemed dim, as if burned down to a coal. His tail hung limp about his legs. "I could just force you back to camp and hold you there. You would get over this. You would learn to live, if you just waited."
"No," she uttered, the word dropping from her lips like a stone, matching the weight pulling down her gut. Her ears drooped, nearly disappearing in disheveled hair. "Not with--not with you... with everyone... Without Thalen. My--my baby girls." The words came with effort and from a tight throat, but the tone was final and somber, as though delivering a death sentence.
Walking back to K'piru, reins of both chocobos in one hand, the birds seemed hesitant but complied. They both huffed and pulled back in surprise when K'ile reached out and grabbed K'piru by her clothes, just at her neck, pulling her towards him again. "You don't get to die. Not when the whole reason we went out there was to protect you. Respect that. It's why they're dead."
A strangled noise of protest escaped her throat as he spoke, and she tried to pull away from him, shutting her eyes tight. "No, it's--that's not--I didn't ask him--I didn't ask them to... it's not my fault!" She shrieked and turned, heedless of his grip on her clothes, and shoved roughly at him. "Don't say that--I couldn't stop them! I didn't want them to go! I want them..." Her limbs went limp, including her tail. "I want them back..."
When she turned away from K'ile, there was the sound of tearing cloth, but he ignored it. On impulse, he let go of the reins and wrapped his other arm around her, pulling her against his body with a powerful desperation. "It's not your fault. It's mine. I should have brought them back. K'piru, you can run if you want to. But you can't die."
K'piru sobbed lowly, hanging limp in his arms. Like this, with her back pressed against him, if she closed her eyes, she could almost...
"Let me leave," she shuddered out, and her hands moved up to clutch at the forearm holding her firmly in place. She didn't pull and struggle against it, though, just gripped it white-knuckled. A long silence settled over them until, barely audible over the dull thudding of her heart in her ears, "It's okay. I won't... I won't die. Please just let me go."
"K'piru," he exhaled, and lowed his head so it was against hers, filling his senses with her smell and warmth, and the taste of the air she breathed. "You're my sister. I love you. Be alright." And then K'ile ripped himself from her and stepped quickly away, almost stumbling. He spun so he wasn't looking at her anymore, taking another step. "And take the chocobos. Trade them for supplies. No arguing."
When K'ile removed himself, K'piru felt suddenly very, impossibly small, a single grain of sand in an endless desert beneath an equally endless sky. She felt as though she would be crushed by the weight of that perception, but then he spoke again.
She lifted her head, blinking slowly through the tears that still refused to fall in confusion and turning her head slightly to catch K'ile's form out of the corner of her eyes. "You..." She couldn't finish the thought, tried to swallow back the sob that wanted to stutter from her chest, clawed at the loneliness that settled in at his actions. This is what she needed.
She wouldn't argue though. Her head bowed and she sighed out, "Okay."
Okay.
K'ile paused, and his entire body seemed to tanse to the breaking point and shutter against its confines. In that moment, K'ile had a thousand thoughts about K'piru, each of them unwise, beyond reason, and impulsive. He wanted to scream at her. He wanted to cry. He wanted to carry her back to the tribe kicking and screaming. He wanted to set her on fire and watch her burn. He wanted to throw her down in the sand and...
And he wanted to do all of it, right then. K'ile decided to do everything that occured to him, and to do them all at once, but when he tried to move in a thousand different directions, he just stood still and closed his eyes. In his chest, he uttered a curse so powerful that it had no words, no thought. It was the darkest thing he'd ever felt, a point of black that would make even the scales of the dragon that slew Thalen seem bright by comparison.
But in all of this, he paused only a moment, before he continued to walk away.
K'piru did not move, did not breathe. She said nothing as K'ile walked away, though her ears strained to catch the fading shift of his feet in the sands. When another gust of wind picked up, she felt as though she would join the sands, broken apart into a million pieces and washed away in the dunes, forever forgotten.
As the sounds grew so distant that they merged with the white noise of the desert, she was gripped with a desperate urge to turn and charge after him. She even felt her legs moving, muscles burning and straining to carry her through the sand, but when she blinked, K'piru realized she had not moved at all. One of the chocobos chirped behind her, a low trill, and nudged its head against her back.
Something hollow and dead tolled in her head, echoing against the inside of her skull, and K'piru dropped to her knees in the sand. One hand moved to loosely grip the reins of the chocobo that had wandered near.
She remained quiet and alone in the sands until well into the morning. Then, when the last of the dew was evaporating off what few plants eked out an existence in the Sagolii, she stood, climbed onto one of the chocobos, and continued on the same northward path she had begun.
The air had cooled significantly at some point, suggesting to K'piru as she pulled herself slowly to some measure of external awareness that it was night. She smelled K'ile before she saw him, the scent sparking a pain in her chest that left her breath short and her eyes burning uselessly. He lay next to her on his side, body still save for a faint sign of breathing.
He seemed asleep, or unconscious.
Her limbs ached and protested, joints moving with stiff reluctance as she slowly unfolded her legs beneath her to stand in the tent. Small tremors shook her, echoes of a grief that still clouded her thoughts. For a time, she simply stood still in the tent, trying to ignore K'ile's scent, the flashes of memory, of her daughters' smiles or Thalen's warm hands. She tried to ignore the fire that raged as a nightmare in her mind and that left a pit deep in her belly charred black and empty.
K'piru had wanted K'ile's comforts to be enough, but the pain was not receeding, and even his simple presence seemed only to make it worse. The guilt that hazy thought came paired with nearly brought her to her knees again, but instead she stumbled forward sightlessly until she was, very suddenly, standing outside under a sky obscured by a shadow of smoke and dust. She didn't remember walking, but once she started, she found she couldn't stop.
Like a ghost, K'piru slipped wearily around the edge of the small camp, expression dazed and lost and desperate. In the twisting of her chest, that fiery grip around her heart, she found only a need to escape. Her daughters voices haunted her, and she turned many times to her left or right at a familiar weight at her side only to find Thalen's memory fade and burn. These delirious thoughts pestered her at a frenetic pace, dogged her every step until she wanted to drop into the sand, scream, and simply die. Her body did not obey this want, however, and through the shroud of ghosts around her, the only other way she could think to flee those faces and smells and memories was to leave entirely.
In the middle of the night, without a single word to the rest of the remaining tribe, K'piru simply disappeared. If one checked later, they would find a chocobo missing - the eldest and least valuable - as well as a small portion of water, though no food.
***
Hunger had caught up to him. By the time he'd tried to eat anytihng, shivering and pale, his body was ready to collapse, and so it had. K'ile lay still in an exhausted haze at K'piru's side, taking solace at least in the fact that she was fairing better than he was. As long as he survived, and she did better than he did, then she would be just fine. He stared up at her, but all he saw was shadows. All he heard was his own breath.
K'ile concentrated on the scent of her, as it wavered in the tent, as the stink of death and fire seeped in and tried to obscure it. He held the scent at the front of his mind, and for maybe a few seconds, he actually pondered why he so feverishly needed to reach K'piru, and way she was so intangible. The answer he found strangled him, though, smothering out his thoughts and senses until all that was left was inky numbness and the strong, all-important scent of K'piru at his side.
The scent decieved him, though, for it lingered longer than she did. When he was finally able to stir from his state of exhaustion, his body's desperate pleas for food, water and sleep were like distant echoes that he just barely heard, and ignored outright. K'piru's scent had aged. She was gone.
The Tia was a pathetic thing tracking that scent around camp, picking out the shaman's footprints in the sand. She'd gone this way, then there, where was she going? To him, there was nothing else around him. There were no tents, no tribe, the smell of fire and the ehat of the desert were just the sensations of an empty world.
It wasn't difficult, once he'd tracked her to the chocobos, to discern what she had done. He didn't even need to count them. The mingling smells and the tracks in the sand told him everything he needed to know.
He lingered in his haze, for a time. His body was shivering. He'd stopped sweating, dehydrated. There was a voice of reason in his mind, shaking him, telling him to go find food.
K'ile wasn't the best at riding chocobos. He hated the animals so greatly that he refused to even take one on hunt. But everything was upside-down right now. Any sense of comfort or reason, even basic needs like food, were now secondary to this new, bizarre need that he did not completely understand. He thought, it probably wasn't even about K'piru, and yet...
He'd taken the first Chocobo he'd been able to get his hands on, barely taking the time to throw a saddle on it, securing its straps with his shaking fingers, before he took off to follow K'piru. The desert around him was wounded, with vast black scars, but he onyl cared about the scent of K'piru and the chocobo she'd taken.
***
K'piru had found north, an easy task even in her half-delirious state thanks to decades of plotting the skies of Sagolii, and set the old, confused chocobo on its path. She had no real concept of what lied beyond the desert save for scattered stories of trading towns brought back by tribe members on their occasional forays for goods, but as she half lay over the chocobo's back, hands shaking around its reigns, K'piru found this didn't matter. She wouldn't stop in Thanalan. She knew it wouldn't be far enough.
For a brief moment, she wondered if she could find the battlefield K'ile had returned from, but no sooner had this thought skittered across her mind did she recoil from it. Against the backs of her eyelids, she saw the bodies of her daughters, of Thalen, splayed out on decimated ground and shriveled the same black as the corpses she had spent an endless week tending to already. Her stomach wrenched and she nearly toppled from the chocobo's back as she gagged back bile, then buried her face in the feathers ringing its neck. The beast chirped in confusion but continued on; she hadn't given it the signal to stop.
The dunes rolled by unnoticed by K'piru. At some point, the chocobo's pace slowed as it tired, and she became aware of a dull hunger pressing at the edges of her stomach. It had not seemed right to take much from the tribe, not even in her manic state, and she knew enough about the lay of the Sagolii to find her way to food of some kind when she needed it. But for now, the grief in her gut crowded out much of the hunger.
She didn't notice when the chocobo lifted and turned its head, sensing the approach of someone familiar.
There was no hesitation in K'ile's approach. He spurned his chocobo into a full run as he sensed himself nearing the source of the scent, and the younger, stronger chocobo caught up the K'piru's easily. Overcoming the summit of one final dune, K'ile's mount uttered a warble to alert him, and he urged it in the direction. He instructed it to ride faster, not slower, as they approached, and the only thing that stopped the two birds from colliding was the stubborn good sense of K'ile's Chocobo. It stopped and squawked, feet tearing up the sand, feathers on its neck rubbing against the feathers of the other bird.
"K'piru!" K'ile said, harsh and breathy, reaching out and taking hold of the reins of her bird. "What are you doing!?"
For several, long seconds, K'piru sat in confusion, hands hanging limp where they had once held the reins. Then that achingly familiar scent caught up to her senses, bringing with it memories that once had been warm and caring but now carried only fire and death. She cowered as though hiding from it, or K'ile's words, or K'ile himself.
"I can't," she whispered, voice cracking. The chocobo beneath her had stopped and had begun to exchange a few, quiet chirps with K'ile's, but K'piru tried to urge it forward. "It's too much. Just leave me... leave me be. It's better--" She could feel her throat clenching and her body wrapping around sobs, but she'd run out of tears a day ago. That didn't mean it hurt any less. But it was better. She was useless to the tribe like this, and she knew, without any shadow of doubt, that she could not overcome this. Not like she had overcome K'aijeen's loss. This was just too much.
His hand tightened on the reins of K'piru's chocobo. They tightened so his hand hurt, and his teeth ground. He could feel himself starving, but for everything except food. The woman felt far away, and she was getting farther. "That's not..." She didn't understand. She wasn't listening. "K'piru, there is nowhere to go. The world is barren. It is empty. And there's nothing in the tribe, either! There's just... us." He pulled against the leather, and looked down into the sand. "I could be everything K'thalen was, if you need me to be. I'll learn how."
"You can't!" K'piru nearly screamed into the empty night, and her thoughts flashed back to that singular, first moment - stifling heat, the shadows of a tent, and that grinning boy promising he wouldn't give away her secret, that he'd let her be what she wanted. Then that boy was wreathed in flame, his image shrouded in smoke, and there was nothing she could do. He had left her. Her daughters had left her. She was alone.
"You can't!" She repeated and turned her face to finally look at K'ile, eyes wide and shaking. "They're gone! Nothing--no one can replace... I can't be..." She could only hold the look for a few seconds before the sight of him became too much and, feeling utterly trapped with the ghosts closing in all around, she slid down the opposite side of her chocobo and dropped unsteadily into the sand. It wasn't rational. It wasn't reasonable. To anyone but K'piru, it would have been an act of stupity. But she could not be here. It was all she knew.
"I can," he said, but the words were uncertain and weak. "You just... Won't accept..." K'ile wrenched his hand free of the other chocobo's reins and threw his arm out angrily, "I'm not trying to replace anything! I'm not Thalen! But I know I can be enough if you'd just accept that! I'm alive! But that doesn't mean anything to you!"
She started to walk. The chocobo K'piru had taken turned its head to watch her and shifted its large feet in the sand anxiously. At his words, she flinched, hunched her shoulders and wrapped her arms about her stomach in a childish gesture. The tattered and dust-and-blood stained wrappings she word shook in a faint, brief breeze just like her voice shook when she spoke without looking at him, "It means..."
She swallowed. She should be glad K'ile had made it back. If not happy, then at least relieved. Maybe she could have been if his return had not also meant the absence of his brother. There was a keen guilt in that acknowledgement; K'ile didn't deserve resentment, didn't deserve the arrow of her grief and cowardice.
"It means you should go back to camp, and care for the others left alive," she finally managed. Her tone was low, defeated, lost. In a far corner of her mind, where the flames did not reach but for the press of thick shadow, a somber voice told her that whether she made it out of Thanalan or died in the desert didn't matter. At least she would escape.
"And what if I don't care about the others?" K'ile steered his chocobo towards her, causing more confusion in the older bird that she had abandoned. The thing warbled in bemusement and followed awkwardly. K'ile followed K'piru slowly, distantly, as though there were some reason to stay away from her. "What if you're the only thing left I care about? What if I'd rather go with you into that empty world than go back to the tribe alone?"
Squeezing her eyes shut until she saw small spots of light against the backs of her eyelids, bright flashes that echoed the seemingly sourceless explosions of flames that had battered the tribe to ashes, K'piru hesitated but did not stop her walking. She couldn't. Her legs moved without her conscious input, carrying her slowly away from the ghosts.
Then without warning she stopped, so suddenly that her body swayed forward before she jerked in place, spinning around to stare wide-eyed at K'ile. Her chest ached, heart pounding wildly against the cage of her ribs, the dull beat of blood mixing with the roar of flames in her ears. She wanted to flee and hide and cry and scream. Instead she found her voice tearing from her throat in a broken shout, "I can't keep you with me!" A blinding heat distorted her vision, and she leaned back, turned away, suddenly breathless. "I can't," she added smaller, quieter. "I need to go away. You need to..."
In a sudden bout of frustration, K'ile kicked himself off of his chocobo suddenly enough that the bird started in ran a short distance away. The Tia hit the sand heavily and reached out to grab K'piru by one arm. He considered, however briefly, forcing her to stay. He could hold her until she came to her senses, and she would come to her senses. She might die out here in the desert if she just walked off like this. Especially if she walked off like this.
"K'piru, we need each other. You want to run away, but you need to stay." He felt the muscles in his arm and hand lock down about his grip on her arm, his fingers numb. "Everything will be alright, if you stay. I promise."
"Please don't," the words shook from deep in her chest as she leaned away from K'ile, against the pull of his hand. She didn't want to hear his words, didn't want any more reminders what she was abandoning, what she had no choice in abandoning.Â
His scent pressed in all around her, suffocating. His voice merged with the warmer tones of Thalen's, and she cried out, suddenly frenetic in her attempts to get away. "Just leave me alone! I don't want you to--I need to go! I can't... Leave me to die if I so choose!"
Part of him tried to let go, but most of him couldn't. Just like his starving body was supposed to be seeking desperately after food, he was driven to hold onto her, to drag her back. "You choose to abandon home, and family. You won't be okay. I won't be okay! There is nothing! Why would you choose that?"
He pulled her towards him, a forceful gesture. "I'm not going to let you walk off and die. You wouldn't even make it out of the desert like this."
Wasn't that half of the point? If she died out here, if she made it out of the desert, out of Thanalan - it made no difference. The flames had held no pity for her daughters or Thalen; she would take none either. When he dragged her forward, K'piru brought her other hand up between them, palm flat against his chest as though to ward him away. Her face she turned away from him, denying his presence as much as she could.
"I don't need you," she choked out, shivering with overwhelming emotion. "I need my daughters. I need Thalen. I don't--not you. I need /them/, not you!" Her hand curled into a fist and she slammed it against K'ile's chest with her last cry.
K'ile let go of Antimony suddenly, releasing all the force with which she was pulling away, and said sternly, "You don't get to die."
Behind K'ile, both chocobos chuffed and chirped in agitation, sensing their riders' distress but unsure of the source. When K'ile released her, K'piru stumbled back, nearly falling into the sand. When her feet found purchase, she hunched away from K'ile, hugging herself.
How could she respond to that? Her mind churned, along with her stomach, and soon those ghosts of memories were vying for her attention once more. She couldn't bring herself to say that it wasn't his place to tell her such things, that if he had lost as much as she... but that wasn't fair. K'piru knew it wasn't fair, but it hurt too much to care. She shuddered and could only beg once again, down towards the sand, "Please, just let me go."
K'ile turned and took hold of the reins of both of the chocobo. His hair hid his features, and in the dark, his fire-red hair seemed dim, as if burned down to a coal. His tail hung limp about his legs. "I could just force you back to camp and hold you there. You would get over this. You would learn to live, if you just waited."
"No," she uttered, the word dropping from her lips like a stone, matching the weight pulling down her gut. Her ears drooped, nearly disappearing in disheveled hair. "Not with--not with you... with everyone... Without Thalen. My--my baby girls." The words came with effort and from a tight throat, but the tone was final and somber, as though delivering a death sentence.
Walking back to K'piru, reins of both chocobos in one hand, the birds seemed hesitant but complied. They both huffed and pulled back in surprise when K'ile reached out and grabbed K'piru by her clothes, just at her neck, pulling her towards him again. "You don't get to die. Not when the whole reason we went out there was to protect you. Respect that. It's why they're dead."
A strangled noise of protest escaped her throat as he spoke, and she tried to pull away from him, shutting her eyes tight. "No, it's--that's not--I didn't ask him--I didn't ask them to... it's not my fault!" She shrieked and turned, heedless of his grip on her clothes, and shoved roughly at him. "Don't say that--I couldn't stop them! I didn't want them to go! I want them..." Her limbs went limp, including her tail. "I want them back..."
When she turned away from K'ile, there was the sound of tearing cloth, but he ignored it. On impulse, he let go of the reins and wrapped his other arm around her, pulling her against his body with a powerful desperation. "It's not your fault. It's mine. I should have brought them back. K'piru, you can run if you want to. But you can't die."
K'piru sobbed lowly, hanging limp in his arms. Like this, with her back pressed against him, if she closed her eyes, she could almost...
"Let me leave," she shuddered out, and her hands moved up to clutch at the forearm holding her firmly in place. She didn't pull and struggle against it, though, just gripped it white-knuckled. A long silence settled over them until, barely audible over the dull thudding of her heart in her ears, "It's okay. I won't... I won't die. Please just let me go."
"K'piru," he exhaled, and lowed his head so it was against hers, filling his senses with her smell and warmth, and the taste of the air she breathed. "You're my sister. I love you. Be alright." And then K'ile ripped himself from her and stepped quickly away, almost stumbling. He spun so he wasn't looking at her anymore, taking another step. "And take the chocobos. Trade them for supplies. No arguing."
When K'ile removed himself, K'piru felt suddenly very, impossibly small, a single grain of sand in an endless desert beneath an equally endless sky. She felt as though she would be crushed by the weight of that perception, but then he spoke again.
She lifted her head, blinking slowly through the tears that still refused to fall in confusion and turning her head slightly to catch K'ile's form out of the corner of her eyes. "You..." She couldn't finish the thought, tried to swallow back the sob that wanted to stutter from her chest, clawed at the loneliness that settled in at his actions. This is what she needed.
She wouldn't argue though. Her head bowed and she sighed out, "Okay."
Okay.
K'ile paused, and his entire body seemed to tanse to the breaking point and shutter against its confines. In that moment, K'ile had a thousand thoughts about K'piru, each of them unwise, beyond reason, and impulsive. He wanted to scream at her. He wanted to cry. He wanted to carry her back to the tribe kicking and screaming. He wanted to set her on fire and watch her burn. He wanted to throw her down in the sand and...
And he wanted to do all of it, right then. K'ile decided to do everything that occured to him, and to do them all at once, but when he tried to move in a thousand different directions, he just stood still and closed his eyes. In his chest, he uttered a curse so powerful that it had no words, no thought. It was the darkest thing he'd ever felt, a point of black that would make even the scales of the dragon that slew Thalen seem bright by comparison.
But in all of this, he paused only a moment, before he continued to walk away.
K'piru did not move, did not breathe. She said nothing as K'ile walked away, though her ears strained to catch the fading shift of his feet in the sands. When another gust of wind picked up, she felt as though she would join the sands, broken apart into a million pieces and washed away in the dunes, forever forgotten.
As the sounds grew so distant that they merged with the white noise of the desert, she was gripped with a desperate urge to turn and charge after him. She even felt her legs moving, muscles burning and straining to carry her through the sand, but when she blinked, K'piru realized she had not moved at all. One of the chocobos chirped behind her, a low trill, and nudged its head against her back.
Something hollow and dead tolled in her head, echoing against the inside of her skull, and K'piru dropped to her knees in the sand. One hand moved to loosely grip the reins of the chocobo that had wandered near.
She remained quiet and alone in the sands until well into the morning. Then, when the last of the dew was evaporating off what few plants eked out an existence in the Sagolii, she stood, climbed onto one of the chocobos, and continued on the same northward path she had begun.
![[Image: AntiThalSig.png]](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/179079766/AntiThalSig.png)
"Song dogs barking at the break of dawn, lightning pushes the edges of a thunderstorm; and these streets, quiet as a sleeping army, send their battered dreams to heaven."
Hipparion Tribe (Sagolii)Â - Â Antimony Jhanhi's Wiki
