8: Parallels
He's a lean man now, with enough hard-earned faith in himself to walk with pride. He's lost most of the gangling awkwardness of his youth beneath layers of steel, in the fires of war.
So much has changed...
But as his white stallion, now gray with dust, trots steadily up the long road lit only by the light of the gibbous moon, he senses that he is also weary, aching in places he doesn't want to remember or name. He doesn't let on, of course, if only for the sake of his lord and his people, but he can't suppress the temptation to laugh at the irony. A youth who has yet to see even his thirtieth spring, but already so tired...
Perhaps that's why he has chosen to follow the road he walks now: for a renewal of vigor at the altar of an old sanctuary.
I'm coming home.
He sighs.
And then he smiles.
She, in turn, has lost most of her softness. She hides behind her books and shadows less with every passing day.
Perhaps that's why she finds herself pausing halfway through a nightly walk to turn her face into the wind that smells slightly of rain, and listen to what she thinks may be the distant drum of a horse's hooves against the earth.
She very nearly doesn't recognize the man that comes up the shallow crest of the hill, armored but modestly, his mount's flanks dusted with grit from the road. But there's something in his eyes, in the way he holds his head that in its certainty is ever so slightly unsure, that she recognizes.
He's home.