The silence of the wasteland was not peaceful.

Alexandre had spent enough time outdoors in his life to know the difference between natural silence and wrong silence. Natural silence had texture... wind in grass, insects doing whatever insects did, the ambient noise of a world going about its business.

This was not that. This was the quiet of a world that had not yet accumulated enough living things to fill the space between sounds. A structural, aggressive quiet that pressed against the eardrums like being several floors underwater.

The only sounds were his own: the scrape of hide wrapped around feet shuffling against pale grit, the occasional way his breath caught whenever the terrain shifted unexpectedly beneath him. And ahead of him, was Cain.

Cain made almost no sound at all. His feet found the earth the same way water finds the sea... inevitably, completely, without wasted effort. After five hundred years of walking, the man had apparently made peace with the ground, and the ground had extended the same courtesy back.

Alexandre had not made peace with the ground. The ground was aware of this and was taking every opportunity to remind him.

The hide wrappings had loosened somewhere in the second hour. He'd felt the leather strips shifting against his ankles, the knots slowly surrendering to the friction. Fine pale grit worked its way between the hide and his skin, a sandpaper layer that moved with every step.

His blisters had popped somewhere in the first hour. When he had felt the first pop, "Motherfucker!! Fucking bitch!" He'd cursed underneath his breath with gritted teeth as tears welled in his eyes as he continued to walk as if nothing had happened can had already given him the look of someone who was staring at another who was less than a man. He wasn't even disappointed, nor disgusted, he just seemed appaled that someone like him even exists, no less a man. Thus, he doesnt want to know what the man ahead would think of him if he cried over this, so he fould inly endure as a sharp burst of pressure followed by warmth — and now the raw skin beneath was negotiating a truce with the abrasive grit from a position of significant weakness.