It was not natural, the manner in which nature persisted. The way it shone and glimmered like seasalt beneath the hot sun, crystallized specks of starlight over a tanned stone. The way the pines and the great oaks swayed to the breeze, their needles and leaves shaken with an emerald glow in the lack of moonlight. Odd enough – the lack of moonlight – as the night could not pierce the thick canopy of the trees, the moon's glow was a muffled and weak thing that merely illuminated each spindling vein across the backs of the leaves. It did not touch the ground, from whence sprung a plethora of orchid blooms and violets shielded under hosta greens. Each color spoke with resounding brilliance – reds dripped like wet rubies, lavender petals shifted with an opalescence. The blades of grass were twined like boar hairs, soft to the touch but risen underfoot – and nary a space untouched by flora. 

In the night, the sounds had changed. They were not the wary calls of cuckaroo and distant fawns in the brush – they were an echo of howling, of longing, of mournful sobs and the resolute interruption of a shriek unlike the rest. More pronounced was the hum that seemed to rise from beneath the ground, a low drone that pulsed and breathed, as if the soils should upturn with a heaving rib, and the mountainous volcano spread wide its great maw in yawn. The breeze is serenity in honeyed sway, an almost confectionate inhalation that is potent with lilac pollen and bergamot. It tousles the surrounding wildlife – but it is a wonder that they were not all moving to begin with, a collection of vibrance and vitality that all manifests in hivemind.

Despite these stunning abnormalities, the air possessed of itself the overwhelming feeling of extreme comfort – as if it was a place to rest, to cradle yourself in the roots of a swaying oak and breathe, sleep, dream... 

Erasmus does none of the two former. But he could not deny the presence of dream that lapsed over him like a wave – unbidden, unwarranted, and unstoppable. All things unfolded before his eyes as they were, a magnanimous menagerie of unforeseeable sights, a visionary's ambitions that could wet the palette with glory. The birds, stunning quartz creations of needle beaks and ruby eyes, and the obsidian gleam of shuddering feathers with star-pricked glares that watched ominously from their nests, their ticking jeers called from the curious pandemonium as he met clearing with clearing, the path unfolded from each footstep so as his calculative gait no longer hitched with hesitation. It moved as all else moved, naught but a machination unrolled from the conveyor – flesh and blood and feralty that matched the wickedness of the garden. Nightside of Eden; where forbidden tastes wrapp'd its every breath with timid contemplation, each flavor more vibrant than the last. It is smooth, lacquered respiration that he drew in easy as wading still clear waters, its sweetness a cloying taste that lingered on his tongue.

It was uncertain how long he had traveled or how deep into that forest he had wandered – time seemed to stop there where he was, though everything about it continued as if it could not apply. The sounds were no longer a concentrated mass of distant yelping and yowling and incessant clicking that seemed to carry on for miles – they were all around, evenly distributed through each tree and brush and loitering shadow that loomed with pernicious nonentity. The feeling is celestial. The hum is loudest there it appears, so loud it thrums in his ears and in his chest, stirring the uncoiling mass of shadows that writhe slowly at his core. It crawls beneath his skin like vericose vein, morphine mellow, dripping down his spine and flooding the senses with an unmatched high. It drones lowly, too low for the ground to shake (though it feels it should, it could, as if but a tad louder and the entire island could crack with the weight of its power and succumb to the terminus sea) and too thunderous to be ignored. It is all that carries him, deeper and deeper until his thoughts are no longer his own but something else.

It was in that moment that he discovered the creek – or it had discovered him, as it seemed here was natural for a creek to do, to unwind itself from shorelines and sweep the blissful naiads from dream to dream. A conscious earth. He stopped then, the hum a quiver through him, while his body stood still as glass. A hundred black stones lay at its shore, all glimmering and shifting like droplets of oil caught in their own worldly tides. For a while he stared, uncertain of their purpose or nature, as they continued to glisten with unearthly transference, and all but at once a single stone shed its iridescent skin and revealed beneath a polished, smooth river rock of pure obsidian. He marveled at its cool exterior, its sheen beneath the not-moonlight, the glow of faint green cast to everything but itself. Erasmus, taken by the drone of the island and the possession of awe, lowered his nose to brush against its softness.

In an instant, the smooth stone unfurled into a mass of writhing serpents, each one black and rippling and slithering madly from their point out to spread into the forest. They entangled themselves at the bed of the creek, wrapped and unwrapped about his hooves, their scales as thick and cold as the stone itself – they dispersed each, hissing and unwound into the night. One remained as Erasmus took a small step back to observe and evade some of the harmless assailants, and it coiled back in a tight S, its dark maw unfolded with fangs that pulled from its jaw. He appealed to its threat with his own, his lips curled back over his set that gleamed with a sharpness that outmatched its offender. Satisfied, the snake uncoiled and too disappeared into the brush.

As it vanished out of site, the sounds about the clearing hushed with an immediacy that would have stunned him if it were not for the constant hum that filled his blood.

The creek shifted, its silvery current sweeping with it the oily sheen of its hematite stones – until it ran dry at the same moment that the noise stopped. Erasmus drank in the shadows that caressed across his frame, the odd glow that filled the forest now dulled and trickled through in small spots that danced with a faint breeze. He turned behind him, watching the flowers blacken one by one. They did not die – not wilt and brown and wither to the grasses beneath them – they simply darkened at the multitudes, from vibrant reds and pinks and blues to velveteen petals of black and deep, bottomless purple, and on them sparkled dew with the radiance of a thousand stars. He turned back to the dried creekbed, and saw now that it was a winding rut filled with charred bones, fractured skulls and broken ribs that jutted from its belly, and he wondered if it had ever been a creek at all. 

And the drone turned from sweetness to pins and needles, first at his core and winding up his spine until his jawbone clicked with the spark. The faint, spent glow of the not-moonlight shimmered over his features, damp with dew and slight perspiration, sharp across his rigid features as they raised high above his shoulders. His horns shone with their onyx resplendence, his gold glimmering grins beneath the fingers of shadows pulled like a thin veil of smoke. He addresses the night as so, for he knows the dark watches. But not what it is. He feels it, cool and creeping as it does upon his spine - and the birds go silent. "what are you?" but he knows, he knows.