8/26/2025, 4:04 PM
yunxu feels marginally better when he wakes, tucked against the shadowed side of a salt-bleached log of driftwood. a couple of nights' sleep has proven the balm he hoped it would be, and he is more than eager to leave the sight of his arrival behind him. walking, at least, calms the anxiety building under his skin.
the old woman must be wrong.
she hadn't been crazy in the way that would be easy to write off. but rest and food and water have restored clarity- believing your own lies is simply a more insidious form. yunxu can't simply believe it to be the truth.
he will prove it isn't.
maybe she couldn't do it for herself. but he is young and not so willing to simply give up. if pulling himself out of the ocean he'd fallen to was the gods' doing, the sea's offering of a second chance... then he will take it.
but he will not entertain this. he will find his way home.
he starts south, because it feels right, at a steady lope that eats up mile after mile of white sand. none of it is familiar. even the cliffs he finds as the end of a day's trek are just as alien. the mountain chain they belong to towers high above him, an effective deterrent. he turns and heads inland.
pine forest is only marginally more foreign than the sea, but yunxu finds himself uneasy the moment he can no longer see the water. brush and pine saplings tangle and snag on his salt-crusted fur. he keeps his head down and his eyes narrowed into thin slits, measuring every step with care, on high alert. having no empty air at his back pulls at every stretched-thin nerve he has.
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