tofi's trail: gaze

The palace was built amidst a large amount of air pockets. They existed both inside the elegant building, and outside of it.

Some of the pockets of air that existed far outside the castle walls, among forests of coral and algae and other things that created a colorful landscape and places to hide.

In one such pocket of air, Izana often found himself reading. He wrapped a book that had been scavenged from a sunken ship or seaside house in a cloud of magic, and brought it with him to a place where he could sit in rays of light filtering through the plants from far above the surface.

He turned his gaze away from the letters on the page as he felt a familiar presence. It usually took between half an hour to a full hour, until he felt the presence and found the same man basking in the sun beams.

Izana ignored his presence, accustomed to it as he was, and the stranger was usually just there, not really saying anything and instead simply resting there half-asleep. They didn’t know each other, and Izana didn’t even know his name or where he had come from, or how he seemed to know when Izana would be there. But it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence, or uncomfortable to feel the man look at him.

But his gaze would once in a while wander to the stranger, would notice the new bruises, cuts, and scars, and he would wonder how he got them. They didn’t, in any way, make the tan skin or the sparkling scales diminish. Rather, they seemed to give him a rugged sort of charm, from his short black hair to his tattered tail fin, that made him seem like a creature of the wild, particularly when he caught Izana’s gaze and his face split into a grin that showed sharp teeth.

As if he knew that the gaze turned upon him made warmth curl inside him, and made the muscles, from neck to fin, tense just slightly. In anticipation, perhaps. Even though nothing ever happened, from the moment he settled in the sun to the moment he left the darkening spot in the forest.

Gaze