There's power in the pause

[Caspa Al-Fateh]

OOC: Hope it's OK to backdate this by a day or two...Say the 18th of April?

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The sky was a stunning pale purple, a blue day waning to pink-golden sunset, but Caspa had no inclination to notice such frivolities. She was in bad humour, and it had so far taken hours to work out why. The spare-framed dog passed among slabs of bare rock that outlined the Shattered Coast cliffs, each one reminding her of tombstones she'd seen in the human settlements. Maybe it was air pressure, or some other unknowable reason, or perhaps it was a relic of stress left over from leaving her entire life behind and everybody she knew, on what was basically a whim - a deeply felt, heart-gougingly pain-induced whim but when it came down to it, little more than an extension of a rejected teenage sulk. And Caspa had thought herself so much more mature, so much more sophisticated than her peers, even than her sisters, they always seemed to be getting tangled up in emotional spats and reconciliations and thinly-veiled hierarchical games, and her priority had always been developing her skills and soaking in knowledge. Now, it turned out that this seemingly superior lifestyle had just been a form of her indulging lusts of the heart, like all the rest of them. She didn't know which had come first, her adoration of the lessons, or her adoration of the teacher and it frustrated her to think she might be so much weaker than she'd thought; her thirst for knowledge degraded by not being purely intellectual. Then there was the simple pain of the separation, which she'd successfully blotted from her mind on the gruelling journey to her new home. It was impossible to listen to soul-sorrows when your stomach was chewing itself from the inside out with hunger, and your feet were as numb as iceblocks from the endless walking and cold. But now, now that she was regaining her sleekness and her strength, she also regained her spirits, and they didn't seem to be in the best of states. Her brows were knitted, fists clenched, she was hardly even watching where her heavy-legged strides were taking her.

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