━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━ ”When you are lost, Naviri, close your eyes and breathe. It will come to you.” His father’s voice chided softly into his mind as Naviri sat on somebody else’s balcony, the home abandoned and himself alone. It was a quiet evening, a rain having just fallen with the sky still soaked in the clouds that had carried the downpour. The Silontaar’s fur smelled of rainwater, and wherever he looked to the world below he saw the city’s light bouncing off the cresting pools and puddles in the streets. The sky was absent of stars, covered twice by the clouds and by the city’s bleeding light from down below. He had been here many times. Maybe not this exact home, or this exact part of the city, he knew clearly that he had been here, somewhere deep within. Countless times, across countless months and, now, years away from home. He knew this feeling, recognized it in the way his shoulders were hunched, in the way an old hood was pulled up over not only his head but his ears, and in the way he hugged his legs to his chest and held them there, tightly, paws balancing against the ledge of the balcony. “Just how long do we have?” Naviri’s whisper cut through the stillness above the city, echoing across the rooftops and drifting to the towering spires that scraped the sky above Regalia. They were words laced with the feeling that had settled deep into his heart and his stomach. He was a creature of absence, absent of breath, food, water, and sleep; and where he had grown so accustomed to absence, he felt stifled and choked by feeling so full of fear and uncertainty. And he was alone to face it all. From the space where he sat, the thin line of the horizon between the world and the sky, Naviri was alone. The world below him passed by in the quietest hours of the city, whilst above there was no comforting cradle that those of faith would find in the eyes of their gods. The gods were silent whilst the men below were far, far too loud. And so Naviri sat in the twilight between two extremes, his magenta eyes set upon the distant horizon marred by the jagged heaps of far too much civilization. He had read all too many of the letters that had been strewn across the city, layering billboards like the first kindling of a fire about to spark. Their words and the shouts of others rang in his ears, present and true: No collar awaits you but the burning pyre; Now, the Hunt truly begins; What is your name? What is your name? The messages haunted him. They consumed him inside out and gnawed at him like a virus that he had no control over. He couldn’t help but shudder and push himself away from the ledge as even now they came to mind. He pushed his legs closer to his chest and wrapped his tail around himself, far from the ledge, a half-glowing mote of magenta in the gloom. It felt like cowardice to him, hiding and sitting far from the rest of the world, but it was all he knew at that moment. It was all he could do in the quiet before the storm. And yet his father’s words still rang in his mind. He could hear his stern voice, strong but patient, and he could see the blood-red markings of his fur like scars counting the decades he had been alive. He could envision his father standing before him, same as he could see his home. He could see the star-hung sky through the magic-soaked air, bright as a kaleidoscope above the overgrown city of Silontaar. It was all there. Naviri softly closed his eyes to hold onto it, to grip these memories as tight as he could. The gentle snowflakes in the winter fall through the old architecture in gentle precipitation. The gentle conversations of philosophy beneath shaded trees, the gentle rolling of the ocean in his ears. The way he would run without a care, dreaming of the day when the barrier would fall and he could finally experience a world he had only ever read about. His home. Paradise. He took in a deep breath, and let his empty chest finally fill with breath for the first time in months. He held onto it, the coldness of Regalia’s air, the sweet scent of fresh-fallen rain, and the invigoration of life that ran through his quiet veins as he held onto a single tiny breath and remembered home. Slowly his shoulders relaxed, his tail unwinding from around himself. He found himself again, and as he slowly opened his eyes, he saw the city of Regalia again. He saw the wonder that he had looked at the first time he had stepped foot on the grand walkways. He heard the laughter of a hundred different people and cultures winding through a maddening world. He saw the way the sea gleamed in the sunrise and how many days he had spent simply watching the distant waters with pure ecstasy. He heard the kindness and charity people had shown not only him but others, the way they couldn’t help but light up with wonder at his very existence, like a myth given life. He saw the humbled people with nobody to turn to, the wounded and the poor, the ones who had no gods, families, or greater powers to watch over them. He felt again all the reasons he had for remaining in Regalia, and he couldn’t help but slowly let himself unwind once more. The breath he held gave way to a new absence, to the clarity that he had felt when he stepped out of Silontaar for the first time to experience the world in true. And slowly he let the breath go, passing silently through the winds of Regalia in the storm about to come. ━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━
