#post exile

Thanks for the tag @starlitesymphony! (to my main blog, @dreameronthewind) Your Ark of the Timelost excerpts are intriguing as usual!

I've never run across this tag game before, actually. This will be for that pairbonds short (?) story I've been buried in, with Issa finally getting to process her emotions.

Here we go!

Rules: Open your current WIP. Starting at the end, find the first sentences containing the conjunctions: and | or | but | still | although / though | yet

And: She thought [Calix] might offer her a shoulder to lean against, and she winced privately away from it - she did not want the comfort of touch - but in the end he merely waited, watching her with what might have been sympathy, and waited for her to go on.

Or: The look on [Ithos'] face was mingled, but as she tried to make sense of the feelings that rocked her back on her heels - anger, fear, regret, pain, bitterness - she thought, or imagined, she could see some of the same emotions crossing his face like bird-shadows, fleeting and dark.

But: "I've put men back together who were near taken apart; I've saved the skin of those burned or flayed; I've closed wounds that would have killed them slowly over days if left to themselves. Flesh and blood and everything in between - these do not scare me, so long as I can do some good. But the little things, the human things, they... wear on me."

Still: "Balderdash," he told her, a smile crooking his mouth. "There's another. Still, you never sound too keen to be there, even when you're avoiding saying anything ill of it."

Though: She could see it in him, hear it in him, that if Ithos had love for anything, it was this garden, this tiny haven in the hills. It was hard to despise him for it, though - or perhaps because - she was aware that they had already begun to live in separate worlds, even as they walked side by side among the same sky-seeking flowers and tumbledown walls.

Yet (I have two segments for this and I can't pick, so have both): [H]e had grown his hair past his shoulders, a change from his former military precision, and one that softened his features. Yet still visible were the scars that crisscrossed his hands and arms, and the newest scar - the deep gash across his throat, the one she could not forget - was impossible to hide. It was the one part of him she felt she still knew, and to see him so much changed felt like erasure, like he had tried to run away and been caught in the act. It made her angry to see him watching her as a mouse might watch a cat, uneasily twisting the gloves in his hands, and wonder who he had tried to become.

Yet (part two): "Do you wish they had executed me when they had a chance?"

calix: ok but why

cook, pointing to ithos: see your bonded? he's finally been learning how to care for others. now I'm going to show you how to care for him.

calix:

My new reality hasn’t really sunk in yet. I just left behind my whole world. Everything I knew. Everything I was – gone in a moment. My father just left. He and Dorian stopped by bringing me the remainder of my belongings. Which was a lot more than we had realized the Venatori were willing to part with. Technically it was all mine. Most of it went into the spare room in Sage’s basement. Fae and…