AND YOU WERE THERE, and YOU were there....

[conning]

He wakes up in the wrong place. That, he knows. He knows it the same way he knows his cheek is resting against stone, the way the air tastes like night time and high altitudes.

Slowly, he blinks his eyes open, staring at the wall of the alley for several long seconds until he realizes that's what it is. He's in an alley, with cobblestone paving, with architecture that he doesn't quite recognize. Everything aches, everything, from his crown to the bare soles of his feet.

He rolls onto his side, then it's onto all fours, onto one knee, stand. He doesn't walk so much as lose his balance in a forward direction, stumbling into the street in an emerald green suit that would be quite at home in 21st century Manhattan.

Comments

[withintenfeet]

Almost always, Loquatius is an effervescent whirlwind of a person. Zerxus has seen him waltz through battles of words and blades and fireballs alike, heard him puncture centuries of tension with a dozen words or less.

He most have heard something, in Laerryn's voice. There's a grim intensity to him now, a focus sharpened into something uncanny, and those gleaming silver eyes only turn more piercing as they take in his friend's expression.

"What's going on?"

Zerxus explains as much he can, walking Quay up to the room, but he can feel the moment it all really hits: seeing Laerryn there, clinging to composure with her fingernails, tender and brittle and so horribly, beautifully stubborn.

"Well, fuck."

[conning]

She blinks, like someone waking up as they start to nod off, and the curse gets the briefest ghost of a smile. Only the people who know her best would even be able to see it, in the way her eyes crinkle so very very briefly.

She stands. "His breathing doesn't sound great."

She could clarify that she means Neal's, but clarifying means further assertion that Evandrin is gone.

A spark of rebellion lands on something in her spirit and starts to burn. Gone, but not out of reach.