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It’s unreasonable to have expected your choices to take you down any other path than this. You were always going to find yourself here.
Mist touches your skin, permeating through the relatively thin layers of your clothing and down through to your bones. You’d like to say that the cold air numbs your distress, shocks you enough to calm down and jolt out of it, but… truthfully, it has little effect on why you’re here, crying and swallowing shaky gulps of air with your arms around yourself and a silver turquoise ring in your fist. You don’t notice the osprey dæmon that soars overhead.
The soft sound of familiar footsteps draws another shuddering breath into your lungs, your hand wiping shaky and surreptitiously—you hope—at your cooling tears. You want to greet him, as you normally would, but you know your voice would betray you. Although, if he’s here right now, he already knows, and you’re taking much too long to say anything anyhow, and he’d be an idiot not to know anyway—
He comes to a stop near your shoulder.
“I hope you don’t mind,” he says in that smooth, enigmatically charming voice of his. “Sayan saw you, and I thought you might appreciate an ear.”
Your dry chuckle is exceptionally soggy, and you take a deep breath to steady yourself, breathing it out through your lips with closed eyes.
“Jopari,” you greet, looking out at the foreign stars. “It has been an exceptionally trying time. I don’t think I was ready.”
“Ah,” he says, and you can hear the rueful smile in the sound. “I don’t think most of us are.”
You turn to look at him over your shoulder. “John.”
You’ve come to know him well over these last years. Sayan can journey far, that’s true, but even a shaman with a witches dæmon is reluctant to part too far with their own very self, and shamans and witches alike need unassuming individuals to be their knowing eyes and hands in far off lands. None of you would never have gotten this far otherwise. So you understand immediately.
“You knew Lee would…” your throat closes up on the words.
“I did. I'm sorry.”
The tears come fresh, the heat of the saltwater on your face due to more than mere thermodynamics. It’s as if the anger at the man by your side is finding the only escape it can, through the water of your eyes, leaving room for growing dismay.
“Come back to the camp,” he says, nothing but gentle. “You’ll catch cold and we’ve a ways to go yet.”
You turn away again, looking down at the small furry body of your dæmon by your boot.
“Ah, so I will be continuing on further?” You regret the spiteful comment as soon as it leaves your mouth.
“This is not the world you’ll stop in,” John Parry says, cryptic as ever.
You turn to face him, the stones making their small sounds underfoot. He looks at you, sharp eyes apologetic. “I know you were close with Mr. Scoresby,” he says. “If there had been another way—”
“Then we wouldn’t win, in the end, would we?”
One side of his mouth lifts, once again rueful.
You sigh, and nod. The two of you walk back to your small, humble camp, and John, Jopari, Stanislaus Grumman and all his names, sits with you in silence by the fire. Before you know it, he will be dead, and you will be left behind to tell his son about him.