Coarse grain pressed itself into his skin as Curdle held his pose in the long silence. Whether it was truly any longer than a breath or two, he could not have said, but it felt as though time had ceased its flow. There was no measuring how long she held him captive to her mercy, waiting for whatever release she felt him worth. 

He could feel that sand leaving imprints in his palms and forehead. Imprints as fickle and diverse as the chance that had brought them together. How many other cloth merchants might have been in that market? How many passed through Renna’s gates? How varied were the options of how that day might have turned out differently? It was no accident that fate was entwined in the sands of time. One single grain’s displacement and how many paths suddenly shifted and changed and never again followed what almost had been? 

The old jinni was caught feeling his own weight in how heavily he pressed those sand grains between himself and the market’s stone. Caught hearing nothing but the faint roar of blood in his ears and feeling only the warm brush of his breath across his cheeks where it was trapped against the ground. 

When she finally spoke, he was dizzy with relief, and did not immediately understand the words. It was enough that she released him from the wait, good or bad, her voice offered its own solace. Cold though it remained. The tension in his hunched spine gave out as though his body had collapsed, elbows and shoulders drooping, breath escaping him in a heady rush. 

Her decision was made. 

She turned it into a matter of convenience. The caravan went to Sherahd, and so would she. Even her abrupt dismissal of what was, to Curdle, a hard-won freedom found no purchase when she threw out her barbs. [i]Dumping[/i] Fiira anywhere was not and had never been his intention, but that Miria had considered it even slightly was strong hint that she did not think to simply abandon the urn, ashes and all, where he would never find it, and circumstance might never knock loose the lid. The Lady would not be trapped in the dark by his thoughtlessness. For that alone, she had his eternal gratitude. 

That she was willing to go further in offering her aid, he was stunned into disbelief by how easily the words tripped from her tongue. So impersonal… 

He had not regained his presence of mind or his tongue before she’d turned away, and it was almost all he could manage to lift his head then. But he did, that and more. Slowly, hand shaking, he brought dusty fingers to his lips and reached across to the ground as near her feet as he could. Letting them rest there a moment before he could find the strength to lift himself from his genuflection.

The gesture was not meant to be seen, or even acknowledged. How could it be? There was no possible response. But it was all he could think of to give her in return. She had agreed to help him regain the honour he’d given up too easily. His sense of worth had been lost with it, and was, perhaps, the more significant loss, but it would be far harder to find again. Still, in helping him on the road to one, she set him towards both, if he could take it, though he realized nothing of this beyond his overwhelmed understanding that Fiira would not suffer for his weakness. 

For that, and nothing else, he strove to do as she seemed to want. Unfortunate, that he did not know how to leave, or he would have that very instant. All he could give her was his silence. Speaking no more words on the subject, though he surely couldn’t manage any, just then, so it was hardly an effort. He remained on his knees, as small a presence as he knew how to be, and did not look up to see what she might be doing or thinking now. He did not even raise his hands to brush the sand from his forehead or fingers. He would be as nothing, if she asked it, that he might intrude no more in a private place where [i]no one[/i] else belonged. 

He had no plans to ignore her. In fact, he was very carefully doing the opposite, though he did not wish to give that away. Heedful of her every action, he was listening attentively, watching her feet at the edge of his sight in case she suddenly desired something of him. His gaze, however, would not leave the cloth still where he’d left it. Near to his knee, but not quite touching. Its colours twisted in his vision and the longer he stared, the less its details remained intact. 

He was tired, he realised slowly. And he could feel a new weight on his shoulders, in his chest. His body was heavy. It wasn’t here. But it needed the sleep this dreaming didn’t offer. Or why else would he be tired in a dream?

Already, though he was not aware of it, his shape and form were becoming looser. More insubstantial as his chin began drooping towards his chest. Young and old, sometimes weightless above the ground, sometimes, somehow, beneath it, sinking. Flickering fitfully like a dying fire burning out the last of its heat and life. Though, in his case, it was only his control and magic slipping as his mind began to doze. 

Though it took a long few moments, the end, when it came, was sudden. One instant, he was there, the next, as his chin finally struck his chest, he was gone. No fanfare, no puff of smoke or flash of light, merely empty space. 

In Renna, stretched out on the floor, head tilted by the weight of his horns, an old man had begun to snore.