Sarkan

The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.

 
He’d come here for the island.

The tales he’d heard had been difficult to believe, even to a man who had traveled a dozen countries and seen a hundred strange things. Fever-dreams, they sounded like, yet the sailors were emphatic.

The island had shown up one day in a cloud of black smoke, visible for miles -

A god had made it, and had sacrificed kings on it -

Birds spoke in languages they could understand, creatures were formed of sand and leaves that blinked and walked -

It was a blessing, it was a curse -

Sarkan had smiled then as he smiled now.

It did not seem that the island was as intriguing for the people of Novus themselves; there were only two sets of tracks on the snow-laden bridge. A child’s small half-moon’s, and a wolf’s.

Sarkan had paused to smell the tracks, considering them a long while, wishing he could tell how near together they’d been made. Certainly it seemed that the wolf was following the child, the way the imprints would sometimes wander but always return, and the thought of it made the winter wind nip a little harder at him. He began to lope, then, an unmissable figure running down the bridge, his coat as mottled white and gray as the sky and his eyes as dark blue as the cold cold sea. When he reached the island he stopped only to draw on his cloak, though he left the hood down, long streams of silver blowing from his nostrils.

It was quiet, amid the trees. The birches watched him with their thousand black eyes, and the pine trees shifted, near-black against the snow, and sometimes when he looked up he could swear the trees had switched places. He heard no other sound but the wind in the branches and the shush of the sea.

He did not see the sunflowers. But he heard the laughter.

A child’s laughter, deep and full. After the first moment, when his head had lifted, ears twisting, nostrils flaring in surprise, he breathed out a long sigh of relief. Still alive, then, and close. Now, as he stepped toward the source of the noise, he was cautious. When the birds began to sing, he realized he recognized none of them. And when he saw the child - a girl-child, a unicorn (and here his gut did give an uncomfortable twist; perhaps he felt guilty after all), and the white wolf beside her, he fell completely still.

He did not see sunflowers. But a field of twisting thorns, their barbs long and cruelly hooked, black and green and crimson. Sarkan’s gaze shifted back to the girl, and then to the wolf.

“What do they sound like to you?” he said, and gave no sign he heard nothing at all.

@Aspara

Sarkan

The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.

 
For a long time after he spoke the filly didn’t turn. But the wolf - the wolf stared at him, ruff bristling, teeth white with youth, and Sarkan stared back. It was clear now that the animal was not a threat to the girl but a companion, and it was unclear to Sarkan that it was anything other than a young arctic wolf, still gangly with puppyhood, and so the Percheron’s interest dulled into something more genial.

Still, he didn’t avert his gaze from the animal until the unicorn spoke again. Then his brow furrowed and his blue eyes flicked up, studying the clearing for clues like he would any other patch of wild. But it held its mysteries close, betraying not so much as a track, and nothing in his ears but the whisper of wind.

It did not sound like laughter. Maybe the rattle of seeds inside a dry dead pod. Maybe the scrape of vine against vine. Sarkan’s mouth drew a line downward.

She still hadn’t turned; he didn’t see the frown that nearly matched his own. Neither did he speak again as they both strained the listen, because the only things he would have said - Sisters? They? were the sort of thing he knew from experience would cede no satisfactory answers.

The clouds overhead shifted; the light changed, shadows appearing beneath the vines, shadows at the foot of the ring of conifers. Blue shadows in the bottom of their tracks. A vine leaned toward the unicorn and Sarkan stepped forward, his thoughts touching the handle of his knife they way a hand might brush it, thoughtless, habitual.

What she said then was enough to startle him. He did not draw the knife, but unease slipped through him like an oil-slick, mingling with adrenaline. None of the sailors had said faerie. None of them had said it spoke.

“I think it means they’re lying to one or both of us.” It was almost a relief to have the unicorn studying him; there was something far more uncanny about her face turned away, bent toward what she claimed were flowers, and what he saw were not. Sarkan stood with a hip cocked, relaxed beneath her carefully measuring gaze, his own marking her as curiously. He tucked his chin to hide his smile when she angled her horn at him.

“I’ve never known them to talk at all,” he admitted, then lifted his head to scrutinize the clearing again. The sun was still out, too bright off the snow, making him squint a little. He wondered if “they” spoke more like a parrot or a sphinx. “But I suppose we can hardly expect them to talk like you or I.” He said it musingly, with a shrug of one broad shoulder. When she asked about his scars the smile he wore didn't falter. If anything it broadened; Sarkan generally liked children, and this was far from the first time he'd heard the question. They were far quicker than adults to ask.

“A different moment of stupidity for each of them,” he said, and laughed. “This one,” he said, and traced his nose across one that arced over the left side of his chest like a smile, “is from a manticore’s tail. Luckily it was young, and not yet venomous. This one,” he said, and indicated an ugly, deep pucker just above his knee, “is from a stake I blundered into in the dark. Not so exciting.” Especially since he’d sharpened and placed it himself the day before, then blunted his memory with a large amount of ale. That was early, years ago - back when ignorance often overlapped with mistakes. “The important thing is,” he said, glancing up again to meet her eye, “I learned a lesson from them all, and get fewer each year.” Sarkan winked, then straightened, looking over the unicorn girl and her wolf pup and out across the clearing. “Do you consider this place safe?” he asked, letting the question sound like it was more for his benefit than her own, because he knew how any child would respond to what any adult really wanted to know: should you be out here alone?

@Aspara  <3 (those friends you haven't seen in a decade who have really let themselves go? heh)

Sarkan

The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.

 
Other things talk, she said, matter of factly, as though no one had ever disagreed with her. Perhaps they hadn’t. Maybe in Novus everything had a mind, and all the rocks spoke at a decibel Sarkan just couldn’t hear. That would be terrible, given his line of work.

He nodded obligingly, the way a grandfather would. In his mind, anything that could speak could also lie - but he wasn’t going to the one to pass the lesson on to this blue-eyed girl. That’s what parents were for. Assuming she had them, and not just the wolf, both like and unlike any wolf Sarkan had seen before.

Maybe the tales of the island had grown bigger than the truth of it, if this yearling was exploring it alone. And that was the way of sailor’s stories. Yet the Percheron was still straining to hear a voice from the thorns, like he was Moses.

She listened attentively, as good an audience as any story-teller could want, and this charmed him. At her answer (and the wolf’s answering huff, which he found interesting) he quirked a brow, catching her eye. “Not from the stories I was told. I heard it’s taken lives.” Though in the stories it had been a jungle, humid and close. Then his expression softened, a smile turning up the corner of his scruffy cheek. “As for strangers, I’m glad you have your friend here. Though I’ve met far more good people than bad.”

When she gave her name he dipped his head as though introduced to a princess. “Sarkan,” he offered solemnly in return, before shaking his head at her question. “I’m not sure, but you should hope not. My run-in was a continent away, in a land called Rukh-” he might have gone on then, since she seemed to enjoy his stories; but all of a sudden color began to bleed into the thorns, and they began to straighten, and shed their razor edges, and turn soft-petaled and golden. And though he swore he watched the change, the time between the thorns and sunflowers was less than a heartbeat, as though the former had never been.  Still silent, they swayed like a giant hand was passing over them.

Sarkan was not often speechless, but he found nothing on his tongue now but cold, clear air that tasted of ice. A moment later and he’d stepped forward, until he was just in front of the unicorn, his telekinesis nudging her behind him like a hand on her shoulder. On his other side, his knife was out, white-bladed in the reflection of the flat winter light.

“If you can talk to them,” he said calmly, not yet taking his eyes off the riot of color, “can you ask them what they want?”

@Aspara  <3  

Sarkan

The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.

 
Maybe he should have said since.

But Sarkan had been ignorant of the meaning she took from it, as ignorant as he was of her stare and the way it pressed into him as though wishing her horn was instead. There may have been a burn at his back (the kind from ice, not fire), but the only true threat was the witch-grass before them, and that held the bulk of the stallion’s attention.

He didn’t think  they would do anything - but he wanted to be ready if they did.

A gray ear twisted toward Aspara as she spoke, and to his credit his lip didn’t twitch at the Excuse me. For a moment his gaze shifted to touch on the unicorn, and then the wolf, and he felt the change as they did - the feeling of it, if not the words or the laughter. It might have been better, that he didn’t hear what they wanted. Sarkan had no magic of his own.

Although -

It only occurred to him when she said I think we should go that maybe she was speaking to the flowers (or the fairies) and he simply hadn’t heard, hadn’t seen the change, because of his cloak. As she thanked them he tugged it swiftly off, and then the girl took a step backward.

Sarkan did not crouch quite as the wolf did when the ground shuddered beneath them and the flowers all dipped, in what the stallion took as a bow until they began to melt and brown and die. He did shift his weight, and raise his knife, and turn his head so that he spoke over his shoulder.

“That’s a very good idea-“ He got no further than that before the thorns came, and worse than them the eyes. His grunt came at the same time as Aspara’s cry.

Sarkan generally kept his head well in such invigorating moments. But at the end of the day, his quarry was only animals with animal thoughts - to eat, to mate, to rear young, and all the behaviors allowing these - and not spirits. He could not anticipate their actions or their desires. Though at the moment they were not unclear.

Happily, neither was how best to handle them.

At once he knife was flashing, near humming in his grip as it hewed through sinuous wood like it was simple twine. Now he heard the meadow seem to cry out in loamy voices, and he smiled to himself. The arms withdrew and Sarkan whirled toward the girl and her wolf.

A gesture of his mind and the blade was falling hungry on the roots. “As soon as you can,” he said over the saw of it, “run.”

And he, he thought, gritting his teeth as the blade snapped through one root and turned to another, would be right behind. This was no entity that had anything he could use.

@Aspara  <3  

Sarkan

The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.

 

The magic was not used to such manhandling. Sarkan did not know how new it was, and how hungry, but he could sense its anger, the way the vines and roots hissed as they temporarily withdrew.

He was relieved when the filly listened to him, fleeing like a hare with her wolf beside her. For a moment his silver knife lay still, and he stood a moment longer staring at the clearing, his sides heaving and pulse thundering like a river, as if to fix it in his memory, or challenge it further. It would be beyond foolish to stay, but Sarkan hated a draw like this; if there had been any prize at the end of it he might not have left, might have died alone on the island.

But there was nothing in it save a story, and he already had that. There was only a breath’s moment when the faeries receded, and as soon as the roots began to stir and reach again Sarkan turned and ran, too, the unicorn a flash of white ahead of him through the trees, across the bridge, and at last on the far shore.

He was also foam-flecked, blowing out long breaths when they at last stopped. Quickly he passed a practiced eye over Aspara, searching for injury - though of course she couldn’t have run so far so quickly if she were badly wounded. He had a few bracelets of scratches from thorns and rough roots around his legs, a pattern of marks down one shoulder, but he thought they’d come out better than the plants had. Sarkan faced the island with a frown, one that vanished when the unicorn spoke.

“Thank you,” he said, his earlier smile resurfacing. “I wouldn’t have wanted to meet them alone, or without a translator.” His wink was not meant to be mocking, but he wondered if she took it so when she turned and began to walk away. He watched her, still catching his breath, and a part of him wished she would stay, or wondered whether he should accompany her home, or if he should remind her to be careful in the future.

But she was not his daughter, and if she was he’d be too proud of her bravery to scold her. So he only called, “See you around,” and turned again to the island. For a long while he stood there, wondering.

@Aspara