There was never a good time to traverse the desert. Always it waited, sure as the sea, to consume with heat and wind and time as surely as the ocean did its drowning. Neither of them were quick to give up their bones.
But autumn was a little better than summer, and for Shrike, it would have to do.
She walked now like a fly across the spine of a great and slumbering beast, a small speck on a looming dune. The paint had walked through the night, beneath a sickle moon like a crook of bone, and now dawn was turning the world to soft pearl. It was as alien a landscape as any the riftlands had conjured, and it dredged up in Shrike a strange kind of nostalgia, a homesickness for a place that had tried a thousand times to kill her, and succeeded once.
Ah, but before that she had felt so very alive.
Now she half-dozed as she walked, her dark eyes heavy lidded and ears languid. There was mist at the summit of dunes this high, and it was a cool whisper against her pale flesh.
At last she paused, and looked out over the world, full of blue shadows and faint rose sand: an apt landscape for hunting phantoms.
She had told Raymond she wished to learn more of the world that feral magic had deposited them in, and Shrike was no liar. But she had said nothing at all to Calliope, slipping away from Denocte like one of its thousand shadows, and for that she felt almost ashamed. She was unused to keeping information to herself.
There: a dark line like a gossamer thread, the same kind of line she was leaving behind her. Shrike cut down across the dune, slipping some, leaning back on her haunches when needed, until the sand heaped up above her and she walked in its windless shadow. From high above, the trail had looked like the kind left behind by a snake. Now it was remade into nothing more than half-moon prints; a horse just like herself.
Yet left by a viper still, she thought to herself, and smiled grimly as she followed them.
don't do much these days
keep the wolves at bay
keep the wolves at bay
@Avdotya
