[SWP] between the waves

The thing about Hope was that, just as other lost things, it tended to wash up in places between realities, as if stuck in a filter. He had found the pieces of it in the seams of the world, a not-quite-place between there and nowhere. He'd picked a few of them up, but he knew that there was more out there. There were always more lost things to find, but the point wasn't the magnitude of lost hope washing up in that borderland, but rather, the behavior of it. The orb he had brought back into reality had somehow duplicated its mass, and kept on doing it; if you took an orb and split it, they weren't half the size of the first one.

Hope wasn't measurable. It wasn't quantifiable. What it was, Kisamoa didn't quite know, but it fascinated him in more ways than the obvious. It had a life of its own, and when his orb began to flicker and increase in glow, the deity drifted to a stop, hanging there in the water and staring at it with disconcerting intensity.

As the steadily spreading halo from his orb met with the thrice as blinding one from Watcher, it was like the entire city let out a breath no one had known it was holding. Kisamoa's ears flicked forward as the strange sensation washed through him, things his bloodied upbringing had never shown him: peace, gentleness, hope. He sighed, like the city had sighed. "I think that was it," he whispered into Ruwin's mind, his voice still soft and gentle, as if he wished to make the smallest intrusion possible.

But as he spun in the water to head back to shore, he noticed a new presence; surprised, he stopped moving again, just peering at it. He hadn't noticed her following, and he hadn't seen her before. A newcomer, then—short, pale, sturdy. She looked enchanted by the city, now that it bathed in the light of the still-bright orbs. "Hello," he said gently from somewhere among her thoughts, before drifting closer towards her again. "We're heading back to shore now."

beauty in darkness
kaos in light

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