Chapter Text
Coming in like a western wind
Do you feel home from all directions?
First bloom, you know it’s spring
Reminding me, love, that it's all connected
Coming in like a western wind
— Western Wind by Carly Rae Jepsen
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Avad had always been a dreamer.
This was something he had always known: a fact that had been told to him time and time again, and not in a complimentary way. As a child in his history lessons, he was often scolded for staring out through the balcony with his faraway gaze on the sky. As a teenager doing his swordplay and archery drills, his tendency to daydream meant he was frequently barked at by the swordmaster and punished with extra drills.
There had been one occasion when he’d dared to talk back after such a scolding: an occasion so noteworthy that it still stood out in his mind now, more than a decade later. One morning, after the Sun-Priest Irid had scolded him for having his head in the clouds during the morning Sun salutations, he’d had the gall to reply that having his head in the clouds was virtuous, as it brought him closer to the Sun.
His cheek had been rewarded with five strikes of a switch across his left palm and a stern scolding from his father. Never mind that the punishment had meant he couldn’t practice his swordplay or archery drills for the next three days; it had been enough to reinforce the lesson he’d been told for as long as he could remember: being a dreamer was not a desirable trait. It was a sign of poor discipline and poor focus, his instructors said, and it didn’t seem to matter that Avad always had excellent scores in all of his classes, and that he was consistently among the top three in his class in his swordplay skills — likely due, in part, to those many extra drills. It also didn’t seem to matter that it was Kadaman and not Avad who had the tendency to (very accurately and hilariously) mimic the Sun-Priest Irid’s pompous manner behind his back. What mattered was that Avad was a dreamer with his head in the clouds, and that being a dreamer was, by all accounts, not a good thing.
As he got older, he became more adept at hiding his daydreaming habits. He saved his idle wonderings for the times when he was alone, such as washing up in the mornings or lying in bed at night. He learned to adopt an expression of polite interest that effectively allowed his mind to wander during torturous conversations — an expression that Kadaman fondly called the lantern’s-lit-but-nobody’s-home face. Still, to those who knew him best, there was no hiding the fact that Avad was, and always had been, an incorrigible dreamer at heart: a young man who took to his lessons well and followed his duties like a good prince should, but who couldn’t stop himself from dreaming of a life that was different from the one he led — a life that was just a little less… constrained.
Only one person had ever told him that his daydreaming habits were not a negative thing. Funnily enough, she was also the most pragmatic person he had ever met, and also one who teased him more than once about his tendency to daydream — very quiet and private teasing, of course, since a public friendship between a prince and a palace slave would have pushed his father’s already-teetering mental state to the brink.
Avad remembered the conversation well; he and Ersa had been in the royal gardens at the time, Avad pretending to read while Ersa pulled weeds in a nearby flowerbed. They had been quietly discussing their plans for her escape from the palace, and he had made some off-the-cuff comment about escaping along with her.
She paused in her weeding and shot him a sharp look. “You can’t leave the palace with me. It would be too suspicious. And we need you here, to get things moving when me and the Freebooters come back.”
“I know,” he said quickly. “It was a jest, I assure you. A fleeting thought. I meant nothing by it.”
He expected her to turn her gaze back to the flowerbed, but she didn’t; instead, she gave him a penetrating look. “You get those a lot, huh? Fleeting thoughts about running away?”
He felt a pang of shame. Was this what Ersa thought of him — that he was a coward who sought to flee from the difficulties that his father had foisted on both of their tribes?
He tried to explain himself. “It’s not the running-away per se that I think about. It’s the… the thought of being out there. Free. Not free of responsibility, I don’t mean that,” he added in a rush as she frowned. “You have responsibilities to your people, just as Kadaman and I do. But…” He trailed off, feeling ever more foolish under her steadfast gaze.
She sat back and rested her elbow on her knee. “Go on. Free in what way?”
He sighed, then looked her in the eye. “Did you know I have never left the palace without an entourage?”
Her eyebrows rose, and he nodded. “Not once have I ever gone anywhere outside of the palace unsupervised. I understand that it’s tradition, and having guards is even more necessary now given the deranged machines, but…” He sighed and rubbed his forehead, then gave her a wan smile. “Scrappersap. That’s another thing I wonder about.”
She blinked. “Huh?”
“I fantasize sometimes about trying Scrappersap,” he admitted. “But Carja royalty can’t drink it. Or perhaps they simply won’t, I’m not sure. In any case, it’s not ‘fit for royalty to drink’, so I’ve never had it before.”
Ersa stared at him, then let out one of her signature snort-laughs, and Avad shot her a grin before forcing his face back into a dignified princely expression. “Quiet, quiet,” he urged.
She settled quickly and turned back to her weeding, but she shot him a chiding little smile over her shoulder. “Oh, Avad. Poor prince.”
Her tone was playful, but he felt another hot rush of shame. Ersa was right, as always; what right did he have to complain about such inconsequential things when there were people being thrown into the Sun-Ring every day?
He managed a self-deprecating smile as he dropped his eyes to his book. “Please don’t waste your valuable breath scolding me for the foolish fantasies. I’ve heard it many times before.”
She paused again and shot him an arch look. “First of all, don’t assume you knew what I was gonna say. Assuming anything just makes you an ass.”
He chuckled softly, and she smirked as she went on. “Second of all, I wasn’t gonna scold you. I was going to say that… hm, how do I put this. I think the part of you that makes you wish for dumb things like Scrappersap is the same part of you that makes you wish for… better things in general. Not just better for you, but better for everyone. For folks like me, for example.”
He frowned. “Of course I wish better things for you. You are my friend.”
She gave him a chiding look. “Don’t be so damn humble. I’ve seen you sneaking extra food to the other slaves, too.”
He waved her off. “That’s the least I could—”
She cut him off. “You have hope, Avad. That’s what I’m tryin’ to tell you. Sure, you’ve got that pretty head of yours in the clouds, but it’s only by looking at the clouds that you know there’s more to life than just the dirt under your feet. Aiming for the sky lets you get a bird’s-eye view on how things need to change, and how you can play a part in that.”
For a moment, he simply stared at her. No one had ever expressed such an idea to him before. No one had ever thought of his daydreaming in any kind of positive light before.
He finally managed to find his tongue. “You think that it’s a good thing that I daydream about things I can’t have?”
Her expression went from chiding to exasperated. “You won’t know if you can’t have them if you don’t try. And you’re not gonna try to get ‘em if you don’t even dream about ‘em in the first place, are you? That’s what hope is all about. Thinking to yourself: ‘you know what, maybe I will try and make that dream come true after all.’”
“I… can see your point,” he admitted.
She gave him a kindly look. “Sleep on it a while. You’ll see that I’m right.” She turned back to her gardening as though she hadn’t just said the most profound and validating words that he’d ever heard.
As always, he took Ersa’s advice and considered her words carefully, mulling them over as he brushed his teeth and did his Sun salutations and lay in his bed at night. And the more he considered Ersa’s words, the more he decided to try and see his daydreams the way that Ersa did — as fantasies that were a type of hope: a way of envisioning a better world, and one that he could try and take steps toward, even if those steps were as small as a sip of Scrappersap.
He never did quite manage to make any of his hopes come true, though, even the small and silly ones. Catastrophe struck too fast and too frequently during the later years of Jiran’s rule. Even so, Ersa’s advice would be his saving grace. Through every upheaval that followed in the next two years, Avad lingered in his fantasies at night, and he allowed those fantasies to see him through his days. He used his hopes like a shield to bolster his broken heart through Ersa’s departure and Kadaman’s murder. He used that same hope to bolster his courage through the liberation of Meridian and his father’s necessary death, and his coronation as the fourteenth Sun-King. Later still, when Ersa went missing, he clung to his hope like a lifeline, refusing to relinquish it lest he sink under the crushing weight of his responsibilities and his kingly role — a role he had never dreamed of nor wanted to have.
And so it was that when he and Aloy met, Avad was still an incorrigible dreamer with his head in the clouds, who had never quite managed to make any of his own dreams come true.
With Ersa’s death, so many of his dreams came crashing down. If hope was not enough, if all it did was open him wide for the dual blades of disappointment and grief, then what was the point? Why continue to dream when the reality of his life was so clearly mapped out for him, drawn in lines of blood and carved in stone?
Months went by, and Avad’s grief began to take a softer shade, like linen leaching dye into a pond. Eventually, with the encouragement of Ersa’s memory in his mind, Avad found himself dreaming once more — and those dreams were inextricably tied to Aloy: that fierce and lovely huntress from the east. Her visits to the Sundom were infrequent and unpredictable but extraordinary, like gems sparkling bright in a backdrop of rock, and with every visit she made, his hopes burgeoned and grew.
In time, his affection for Aloy bloomed like a flower under the sun, and to his immense surprise and delight, his affections were requited. During her visits to Meridian, Aloy came to him to talk, to spend her rare idle time and to share small tales of her journeys, and he found himself sharing parts of his life with her that he had never had the opportunity to share before. He was learning who Aloy was, learning more about himself through the talks he had with her, and his hopes rose to greater and more fanciful heights than ever before.
And then, a week before the Battle of the Alight, when the threat to the Sundom seemed more dire than anything they had ever faced before, Aloy came to him with a blazing heat in her eyes that told him more than any words could possibly deign to say.
They came together, then, joining with a passion beyond anything Avad had ever felt before. And for the first time in his life, for the first time since Avad could ever remember, one of his dreams came true.
Like any dream, though, it didn’t last for long; Aloy left the day after the Battle of the Alight, riding out on her Strider at the break of dawn, determined to visit the resting place of someone important that she had never met. Avad was alone once more, left only with the memory of her skin sliding across his sheets and her lips pressed to his. He was left once more with his hopes — hopes that Aloy would come back as she had promised, and that she would tell him about that important person whose resting place she had gone to see. He was left with the hopes that she would come back to him as she had done before, that she would look at him with tenderness in her usually-stern face and touch him gently with her callused warrior’s hands, and that he would find peace with her again, as they had both found in the days before the Battle of the Alight.
Once again, as had happened so many times in his life, Avad was left alone, his hands empty and his head in the clouds.
Avad had always been a dreamer for as long as he could recall. But it wasn’t until many months later that he would see his hopes fulfilled.
It wasn’t until Aloy flew to him on a warm western wind that Avad knew his dreams had been worth it all along.