The Clovenheart

Above, the night stretched on. In the thick woods Ashamin could not see the stars; even this small bit further south, he could not see the Aurora. It was hard to tell himself that he didn't miss anything about the Aurora Basin, and so he did not. It simply wasn't true.

He missed the chill of the wind at night—the chill of the wind in the afternoon, almost always just as biting. He missed the pine forest where he had met Zandora, and the hot springs that had provided comfort to so many. Ashamin even missed Deimos. There had been something heartbreaking about saying such a short goodbye to the reaper. There had been something strange about how they'd never really talked about their moment of almost death.

And the Clovenheart could not forget what the herd had taught him, how it had watched him change. The Aurora Basin, though, had not changed. Somehow, Ashamin the Clovenheart did not think it ever would. It was an ironic twist, a wicked thing for the herd guarded by Time's Lord and God to be forever frozen in it.

Now, in an unfamiliar night but far from the burdens of static, Ashamin snorted and walked on. His companions wove around him, sometimes in front of but more often behind him. Occasionally Rakt summoned tenuous spirits and urged them to press their starlit coats to Ashamin's sides, but the Clovenheart was neither appreciative nor amused. After one or two more times of having his steps quickened he flashed his neck back and snapped his teeth at The Blood.

No, he was not brimming with patience that night. His walk took him away from his current of frustration (his puzzling gift from the Moon Goddess) but no closer to the sky he so craved. He was walking away from the Blood Falls and, vaguely, towards Helovia's heart but had not made much progress at all with his companions tripping him up. But no, he needed to get to the Heart eventually, for it was there that he thought he'd once before seen the words carved into his antlers.

Was there really any other way to decipher them but go to the source? Maybe, if he had thought back far enough, he would realize that it was not a helovian language at all but rather one from his own homeland—one etched into the trees by the rutting deer that had watched over him in twilight. For now, though, the knowledge was still lost to him and his senses were dulled. So dulled that he didn't even notice there was someone else in the Falls' woods.


"Talk?"

ashamin, lochan, & rakt