This place, however beautiful, is without many events. Once I finished exploring what natural splendor it had to offer there was little to do but grow fat on the fresh green grasses of spring, and to watch Skýlos play among the fields, snapping at dragonflies and grasshoppers and whatever else was unfortunate enough to catch her attention. I say unfortunate for the simple fact that whatever she managed to get between her teeth was almost instantly torn into pieces, sometimes eaten, most of the time discarded.

The dog is wasteful.

She is currently wasting most of a young rabbit she found partially ensnared in some vines, the dead thing flopping almost comically through the air and against her blue toned cheeks as her teeth do what they do best. The pelt of the thing hangs off in numerous folds, the only thing holding the skin on at all the few remaining tendons that tie it to the flesh, which she has mostly chewed away.

I say mostly, because I have removed several chunks of the rabbit from myself.

She was swiftly punished with a swift kick. I rarely manage to hit her; she’s grown used to my sourness. She finds it a game.

Each time I miss she yips from a fair distance, pink tongue lolling in mockery of my inability to land a blow on even a pup as young as she. She does not understand that this land has made me soft, even with its tribulations; here I am not watched or judged, I simply exist, and most of the time that existence is alone, with only my Skýlos for company.

She is shit company. We will verify this for the record. Most often I am annoyed with her, seconded only be the times I’ve sworn I’d kill her; unfortunately for me, the magic of this land has bound us in such a way that I cannot actually bring myself to the blow, a mystical smack in the jaw. I was capable of killing my own children, spreading them into a bloody paste against the stone floor, and I cannot kill a puppy, pissing on herself with her tail curled up and pressed tight against her belly, blue eyes pleading with me, the racing of her heart surging my own into a frantic pace.

She makes me weak, and disgusted with myself for other times I was not so soft.

Her only suitable use that I have found is discovered as she immediately discards her ravaged rabbit toy and bounds over the crest of a hill, out towards the tree line bordering the clearing we’ve been loitering in. I lazily follow her, half expecting another deer fleeing into the woods as if the dog is of any real threat to it, pausing as I discover that it is an equine mare, who wanders among the fresh grass humming to herself while seeming to work on some saplings bordering the wood.

Skýlos is a blue dart coming at the stranger, mouth open wide to reveal a bloody array of white teeth and a stained, lolling tongue; it’s a smile, but a gruesome one, and despite my own agitations with the whelp, I dislike the thought of anyone else harming her.

"Skýlos!" I bark, the sharp tone halting the pup in her tracks so severely that she tumbles end over end through the grass with her head turned back to me and her ass still launching towards the direction of the stranger. Increasing my speed to a trot to close the distance between myself and the dog, I arrive laughing at my hound, who lies tangled among herself with an incredibly shamed expression writ across her face, not very far from where the equine had been when I’d first noticed the procession of events.

"My apologies," I say, nodding cordially to the lesser woman, overlooking her bare shoulders for the time as I prod at my dog with a dark tinted muzzle to get her back onto her feet and out of her state of self pity, "she’s young, and endlessly stupid."

@[Florabella]

Cealestis