sinding,

I have always despised the heat and the way that the smell of a hard, stale rain seems to linger like the afterthought of yesterday's nightmare. Its the kind of smell that is light and has long sharp claws; nails that clench the skin between sharp, shiny tips and pinch -- I can feel it now as I meander this way and then that way, going anywhere so long as its neither here nor there. The way the heat writhes through the air, moist and thick, and against my skin is like breathing in the shadows at 3AM: I can feel it there where I don't want to feel anything -- piercing deep, perforating, permeating. I can't shake it. Shrugging my shoulders won't knock it away. A cold, hard glance won't freeze it dead. It's a feeling that I know well and have run from before; that I run from every time the rain stops. It's the same kind of feeling that seeing her again gives me -- the unshakable, relentless battering of a wave that nags and nags and nags at the back of my skull until my mouth unzips and I have only this: salt in my mouth, burning holes in the scabs her memories have left behind. She erodes against me even now, Mikali. She tears me down piece by fickle, feeble piece, and I can feel every stroke, each dilated streak of her fingernail down my spine, while the contours of her marbled face and marbled words tangle in the bedlam erupting so unforgivably in my head.

Mikali: I could call her demoness and sea-witch. I could chase her down with blood-lit torch and glistening pitchfork. I could bind her to the stake and set her aflame; hope that somehow I can make her feel even a single drop of how I feel right now. She is a vampire though: she feeds from me, both in my memory and then, just moments ago, when I saw her again. I would that I could cast her from sight and do to her all the unthinkable horrors to which I, for the next thousand years, shall suffer myself. I wish, and I would, but even as I damn her to the very pits and the oblivion of ice and fire, I cannot completely bring myself to loathe her as, once, I would have done so eagerly. Had she not shown me hurt then, as I left her again (and as I will again and again?) And if it hurts her then why, why must it hurt me? For it does -- it did! -- hurt to see her face with every shutter of an eyelid; that look of barely contained despair, which I . . . oh, how I know that look so! Yet if Lady Luck should place her hand on me this day or the next, I ask it then that she give her what she has never given me: release. Let Mikali forget me while I lose myself in her afterglow. Let Mikali run from me now and run from me always. We were children, we are children still, but we are children who share too much hate between us to go on as we should. We are not lovers and though I would take her somewhere to keep to myself, she is nothing more than a lioness, a she-wolf, and a bow-less hunter. I, I am her prey, and I hate her, I hate her, I -- (love) -- her.

Lost as I was, in both thought and actuality, I noted indifferently how the sun had dipped from its perch and sank at a slow and viscous rate. A thin, wavering branch of clouds stemmed from the midst of the blue abyss; it curled like a tail after the sun and within the white plume I thought I could see her face (she is everywhere). Blinking slowly, I look to the long stretch of grassland that rolls out before me; it turns silver beneath the caress of the wind, the grass bending and breaking in rhythm. It was not so unlike home that, for the briefest moment, I forgot where I was and thought I was home again: Mother would come around the corner with her care-worn smile not too far behind, and she would lecture about how long it had been and how long it better not be ever again. It was just for that moment, though; then the image dissolved into thin air, eroding as I, too, was eroding, until something in the distance shifted and caught my eye. I tensed, but stood still and waited -- lingered with my roots sunk and my eyes alight, for I was not home. I was not with her. I was, instead, lost, and who knew where my foolish feet had carried me this time.

ooc -- herd leaders first, please, and then it matters not. I am hoping to have Sinding become apart of The Grey