"...I ache to be one with it again," Luc whispered, words like a passing breeze upon the still, lukewarm air. "To be truly the sky...."

Their eyes swallowed in the expanse of it, a deceptive nothingness that was anything but, air that drifted lazily, innocuously, around their bodies and over their skin, ruffled their hair, expanded out far beyond where they stood to become the impenetrable, blazing blue that canopied the world for as far as their eyes could see and as high as their minds could imagine. Where the sky solidified to an infinite blue, where it layered upon itself in such concentration that it had ceased to be transparent, it also ceased to look like nothing; it was dense and deep and consuming, like liquid, like light. It felt, on that warm, limpid evening where the light swallowed shadow and shadow sliced light into lazy swathes of beauty, like you could fall up into the sky and drown. The look in Luc's eyes, of pure, untempered longing, spoke volumes of how much he wanted to.

Even Sasarai could feel the boundaries of his body bleeding away, where the faint wind rippled his sleeves into billowing flags and stirred hot against his skin, where parts of him touched the little currents and eddies and fell into them, fell away from him though never separating from him, stretching him out across the world like the late-evening shadows. Shivers pooled in empathy at the core of his right hand, slipping down through his veins like water and causing all of his body to prickle. True Wind hungered, and True Earth was not insensate to its call.

"Have you ever, Sasarai?" His voice was oddly small, lost amongst the wind that only howled within their minds. "Fallen into a perfect blue? --no, of course not. You can't imagine."

Sasarai toyed with a thought. "Is the wind blue to you, Luc?", he asked by way of diversion. "...It's yellow, to me."

"Everything's yellow to you," Luc replied.

Sasarai smiled. "True." You know me too well, he'd wanted to say, if it hadn't been dawning on him at that precise moment how true that statement was.

No, Sasarai had never fallen into the sky. But he had dissolved into the earth, scattered himself a million miles apart over plains and mountains, castles and shorelines, been the wave-rounded surface of every pebble, been the groaning of underground caverns thick with lichens and lime. He had been a child's stone fortress, drawn out in two dimensions with sticks and rocks and mud, hopped over and through in counting games, disassembled before dinner. One of the stones had fallen into a pocket, turned over occasionally by playful fingers, accidentally scrubbed clean by an unknowing mother who hadn't searched the garment thoroughly enough. He had been dust entangled with the wind, and fallen heavy and warm upon cracked desert ground, carried by zephyrs that had guttered and died in the heat. He had been the crystal towers of his own Harmonia, been the spiral staircases worn by innumerable footfalls, reflected dim sunlight into a thousand rainbows through the fractures in his surface. If an infinite gold was like an infinite blue, then he and Luc were not so very far apart.

Yet he knew what this entailed, and it stifled his next words. There was only one way that a person could know such experiences; they would have to have given themselves over to the Rune completely, forged a bond from which they could never be disentangled, from which there was no going back. Others could give up their True Runes and survive, live a normal human lifespan thereafter, but Sasarai had sealed an oath with his soul that he could never rescind, in return for an unimaginable gift. Were he to ever be separated from True Earth-- as he had been, once, by Luc's own hand-- it would tear out a piece of his soul in the parting. He would not live beyond a month. It was a price he'd willingly paid; he anticipated he would never actually have to make good on the funds. True Earth longed to be as one with his soul as much as he longed for it. Even if they were once more separated, they would find each other again, without fail.

But Sasarai had made a conscious decision to bond with his Rune. He suspected, for all Luc's ambivalent relationship with True Wind, that he had not. No, when the Rune had entangled with his soul, it had done so at conception. That had been the cause of all his problems....

"...you were bound to it, weren't you?", he managed to utter, thickly.

"You were, too," Luc replied, more a statement than a question. He had known that much; how he had found out Sasarai wasn't sure, as it was hardly something he shared with everyone, but he had known when he had pulled the Rune from Sasarai's body. Perhaps his own Rune had told him. He imagined it would have known.

"I chose to be. ...it was a little after my twentieth birthday."

"I see." There was some incredulity in his eyes, though his voice was flat; why would anyone do that?, he surely wondered. Yet an invasion forced upon the spirit and a bond entered into willingly were a world apart.

There was a pause before he spoke the question, hushed, as if not wanting to disturb the fates, that Sasarai knew he'd ask. "When it returned to you... the bond, it... healed."

"Yes." And yours did not. "...I'll speak to the Runes. You won't have to feel this way forever, I swear; not if I can help it."

Luc nodded, numbly, his eyes lost again in the infinite blue. "Do what you can," he whispered, and somewhere after that there might have been a "please"; but Sasarai couldn't tell exactly, for the words had been swallowed up too quickly by the wind.