PolarDawn

if you set out to cross the whole world, who arrives at the other edge?


He was naive when he left home, but not in the way you'd expect.

When Dawn set out to find an escaped prisoner, he took a bag of supplies, shackles, and a strong belief that true things are always sad - sharp - dark and ugly. Anyone who said otherwise was simply ignorant and a pitiable fool.

The change happened in fits and starts.

Here an old warrior's smile under a battle scar. There a dark and ugly lie. A day when the sun set warm and colorful and he had watched three birds try their new primaries over and over and over.

The centaur in a marketplace. She'd left three fruit-filled buns on the edge of the counter and turned away, checking the contents of her stand's warming bin slowly. A young knobbly colt went past tussling with an imperial hatchling in a clearly staged manner and a bedraggled little skydancer - with far too many furtive glances - snatched the rolls while the fight had the crowd's focus.
"Why you little - get back here!" the baker projected loudly after them, only to lay a han-foot on Dawn's wing as he started after.
The conversation that followed picked away at who he'd been on many, so many, quiet nights.

"But - but why not just hand it to them? Just because-they should be grateful-"
"They've been taught they're not good enough for true gifts. Or perhaps that they should be ashamed to accept them. And I've been taught to let no one starve. If they think they need to strive and plan to earn a few fruit buns, then I will play along to curb the hollow in their bellies."
And so on. He wondered about crime and considered his hunger when he could find nothing and thought about prison cells with cold meals without a single other warden to bring his thoughts to. He traded the shackles - broken, locks smashed on his unpruned horns - for a replacement bedroll and a safe ride for a stretch of road for a tired family and himself; he didn't think much of it at the time. The part the chains held meaning to had slipped away without fanfare on the Tidelord's shores, or perhaps the edge of the scarred wastes he'd skirted.

He left bits of his old self like shed fur behind him, and much like the fur hadn't realized the newness that came in to replace it until the cable-crossed desert spread before him. Dawn lay in the storm-heat a full day at the edge of a clan that scurried endlessly along wires and squirmed into hatches.
The prisoner's crime had been sad and dark and sharp and far back at the other edge of the world someone had thought that made it true - terrible - unthinkable to leave unpunished with less than her full life.

"Where I'm from, the world is black, and white, and the grey between," he'd told a trained thinker once, feeling proud for noticing such a thing as a blend of shades.
The skydancer had stroked their antennae, cocked their ageing head as the pair surveyed the ancient outskirts around them. The remains of a small meal sat between them, cobbled together from pooled rations. "And which of these is the sunrise in the ice lands?" the sage asked eventually.

The Dawn-who-had-been promised to return or die seeking, and that he would drag the prisoner back in chains the moment he laid eyes on her. He'd inherited that promise. He didn't particularly want it, but one little bit he'd kept and whittled was an unfortunate compulsion to keep his promises.
The night rain passed. He tied on the old philosopher's veil and strode forward into golden shadows.