( The first wakening from his long sleep is torture, the second a disaster. The third, an accident. By the fourth, once he's abandoned violence, Zenobius blitzes through shock, anger, denial, distrust. Finally, wickedly, his mouth ever thirsting and his bed cold, he lands knees-deep in resignation.
This is a fine, private healing room he has been afforded, finer guards stationed before its door. For his safety, his nursemaids mutter, when they restrain him — man of sixty and some, and his back brittle and his joints rickety and mean — and wrestle him back abed. He's not to be toyed with, not to be held like an animal, down.
In the Neutral Zone, they tell him, they don't deploy the malicious droids of Minaras. They don't make his head a haze with the cloying wretchedness of Eidris spells. Here, they expect a certain conduct of their patients.
He does not mutter or mumble or curse, does not tell him these words are as nothing to him, and he is of the lighthouse, the lighthouse is gone, and he paints it for them, in inks and in charcoals, again and again and again. They say it will clear the waters of his head, stir back his memories, though recollections ache him like fine needles biting the soft of his nape, the soft of his temples. He was someone, he supposes. With coarse, worked hands, and a broad back, and his skin leathered by sun. He toiled.
And he dreams of waves crashing, and wakes with ghost-tastes of sand under his tongue, grits his teeth against invisible granules. He remembers friends he cannot name, horrors he cannot untangle. Blood and nothingness. They put him, then, on the milk of the poppy. Watered, first. Then strong. Until his temper's evened, and on a fine afternoon he asks to receive guests — the people, he says, who've paid his board.
It's a rare request the smiling faces of the facility honour. And so he stays, sat abed, yet meddling with his pencils and his charcoals and fresh paper, when a stranger is sat before him, in the visitor's seat. He peers long, wet-eyed, frowning. )
...I don't know you, do I? Not like I don't know everything else, but you. I don't know you.
ZENOBIUS
( The first wakening from his long sleep is torture, the second a disaster. The third, an accident. By the fourth, once he's abandoned violence, Zenobius blitzes through shock, anger, denial, distrust. Finally, wickedly, his mouth ever thirsting and his bed cold, he lands knees-deep in resignation.
This is a fine, private healing room he has been afforded, finer guards stationed before its door. For his safety, his nursemaids mutter, when they restrain him — man of sixty and some, and his back brittle and his joints rickety and mean — and wrestle him back abed. He's not to be toyed with, not to be held like an animal, down.
In the Neutral Zone, they tell him, they don't deploy the malicious droids of Minaras. They don't make his head a haze with the cloying wretchedness of Eidris spells. Here, they expect a certain conduct of their patients.
He does not mutter or mumble or curse, does not tell him these words are as nothing to him, and he is of the lighthouse, the lighthouse is gone, and he paints it for them, in inks and in charcoals, again and again and again. They say it will clear the waters of his head, stir back his memories, though recollections ache him like fine needles biting the soft of his nape, the soft of his temples. He was someone, he supposes. With coarse, worked hands, and a broad back, and his skin leathered by sun. He toiled.
And he dreams of waves crashing, and wakes with ghost-tastes of sand under his tongue, grits his teeth against invisible granules. He remembers friends he cannot name, horrors he cannot untangle. Blood and nothingness. They put him, then, on the milk of the poppy. Watered, first. Then strong. Until his temper's evened, and on a fine afternoon he asks to receive guests — the people, he says, who've paid his board.
It's a rare request the smiling faces of the facility honour. And so he stays, sat abed, yet meddling with his pencils and his charcoals and fresh paper, when a stranger is sat before him, in the visitor's seat. He peers long, wet-eyed, frowning. )
...I don't know you, do I? Not like I don't know everything else, but you. I don't know you.