Keene woke with a start, the chill of the Quarters reaching into his bones and wrenching him from his exhausted nap. He had not planned to sleep very long, and as he stood, shivering, to his feet, he fumbled with the handle of the door until it finally unlatched to let him free into the hallway. Hurrying down the chilly stone corridors, Keene tapped his way down the stairs, his hands tucked under his arms as he pressed them against his marginally warmer body in the hope it would help heat them some. It wasn't long before he was in the courtyard, the tingling sensation of his blood being rapidly heated made moving his digits uncomfortable but preferable to the danger of frostbite. The trip had drawn a more rapid inflow and outflow of air, the heat of the effort warming him from the inside while the muggy atmosphere of the late morning doing the same from the outside. Stepping into the gentle swirls of the courtyard's mists, Keene decided it would be best to head back to the cavern. While it was still just barely morning, the trip would take him the better half of the day. He still had the tree to water, and it was a day he was supposed to be gathering firewood - though a few days previous he had brought back quite a bit more than usual.
As he followed along the winding path, he glanced at the Gug Andjak in passing. The idea of visiting Risabel was not appealing enough to alter his course of trajectory, and there was the chance Derain and his fellow initiate were still somewhere within. While his meeting with the resident Warden in training of the Bloodhills had not been unpleasant, Keene wasn't quite ready to reignite the flames of kinship any time soon. He was certain they had just as much to do as he did, and there was little reason for him to stop them. Letting his gaze fall back upon the path at hand, Keene drew his tingling fingers to his lips, gently blowing on them, wincing as the slight movements he could not seem to control elicited waves of prickling stabs of revitalization. He was groggy, but the sharp stings were bringing his brain back into working order much quicker than was usual for him when awoken without warning.
As he stepped through the doors into the vestibule, he was surprised to see a figure propped up against the strange cylindrical sculpture that stood in the middle of the lengthy hall. Keene had always found it a bit curious there was such a strange piece of work among the massive likenesses that lined the arced walls. It seemed a bit out of place, but then again, he had known little about the island, the citadel, and the residents within when he had arrived. Even after an entire season, he still found there were a plethora of unknowns that might never be solved. He had unconsciously alloted the strange mass of metal in the center of the vestibule as once of those mysteries: interesting but unsolvable through conventional methods. The thin, pale man dressed in an astonishingly nice looking set of cloths sat in what seemed to be thought, pain, or something similar - frustration, perhaps - with his back leaned up against the structure.
Keene, breeches singed so that his left leg had lost the binding that kept it secured below the knee, letting it flag out, and sooty skin, blinked several times at the young man, debating between nuit and Pulsar. From a distance, the man appeared much more nuit-like, but as Keene made his steady approach, leather sandals making little noise against the cold stone of the floor, it became much more evident the man was quite alive. It was rare for nuits to breathe. Nearing him enough to start conversation, which Keene deemed appropriate given the circumstances - of which the details of such were a bit cloudy - , he cleared his throat. The sleepiness had worn into a dull bite against the bottom half of his consciousness, but it had yet to free itself of his voice. A bit of a cough passed before he began his inquiry, voice soft but curious.
"There are marginally better places to rest than at the base of a statue." He raised a brow, his arms wrapped around his body to fend off the cold, but his shivering abated for the time being.
"Unless there is something important about meditating in the Vestibule I haven't been informed of?" The final question was entirely serious. He had found the busy, aloof nature of the nuits to have been one thing before becoming an initiate, but it had grown to new heights of disdain and reticence. Pulsars, marginally better, were always a gamble. A chance for information, however, was much better than absolutely nothing (even if the information was misinformed). Keene was not quite yet able to properly piece together all the strange things he had both experienced and been told so far, but the more information he could gather, the better. It helped that the man, while in appearance a bit more unapproachable than some, seemed to appear as a reasonable enough sort of individual. Of course, the observation would have been a bit more properly indicative of a Zeltivan. Sahovans were... Much more unpredictable. The Pulsars especially.
oocI'll thread with you yet! Haha! And welcome back! I hope we'll get to see a lot more of you in the days ahead. 
