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Or just maybe it is that I was once an ember – a child – the struck match that dances wildly in its birth but shrivels when air dies and the wood cremates. I knew beauty. There was a time when I remember breeze painting blue over the stars, or was it that the stars dropped to grass every sunrise for collecting rays? I can’t remember the way it all happened, but I remember how it always did. I could always see it. But now, I feel that light and warmth around me temper. I am the reaper, draining every leaf vein of its autumn blood just with the slice of my iris. The world strips me as I seek to exude it. Bleed it. I crave a voice, even if it is just the wind to carry off more of my smoke, or even blow me out for good.
But soon, my eyes have drawn confession of the forest in their torture, that voice poured from the densely lined trunks. A gift, a blessing from the moribund season. Silver eyes sleuth off in the shadows, consume every shade to find a deep figure emerge, considerably akin to my own reflection. The instinctual drag of mottled air revealed to me that there have been many tucked in the wood, preying. I took the voice, his scent deep into my body and rooted cloven hooves firmly in the autumn parchment. There was nothing dangerous about this boy besides his colors. The gore rounded menacingly across his flank, glazed his horn, and splattered his face; but those blue eyes spoke loudly of friendly naïveté: intentions that meant mostly nothing to me. I only raised my head, placed sharp eyes against him like weaponry.
“Can you tell me where I am?” I best be getting on my way… It would’ve been true damnation had the whole slew of jurors made council here coincidentally at the death of season and light, all in one particular moment. I might have just tucked my silver crested tail for previously conquered mountains. However, something of the boy shifted as the light moved around him and those knife-like eyes peeled at twin creatures nesting at the curve of his back. My expression changed entirely – I’m sure my chin gaped wide open with query.
They were… foxes.
As if the scents here weren’t bizarre enough.
Even worse now, another voice followed the bloodmarked steed and the body I beheld glaringly was something of a hairy mountain goat, feathered excessively with winter plumage. The beast was wordy enough to buy time for taking in every fascinating feature. I found myself tangled in the drapes that hung like mane from chin to chest to groin, and the horns on this thing. It really wasn’t like me to stare. I traced the ties between these two stallions and their pets while they rambled on about recruitment. Something about this land was very dead in terms of nature, and this time it wasn’t just the season.
“Thank you for this welcome,” I said as the prevailing silence beckoned me, keeping my silver gaze attentive. My voice sounded inexperienced as my stance, and I recognized the domineering characteristic of the mountain goat immediately of men similar to my father – I could assume here that’d he’d be just as pleased. “Dusk is collapsing upon us, however. We can discuss the whereabouts of travel as we do so. I can tell this is a trade post of rouges, and no matter how friendly your welcome, I am not comfortable making waste of time.” With that I started toward the two, nodding to both of them as I entered their route.
"I am Talbot." I would embark as soon as I knew them in name.
live or die, but don't poison everything |
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