He likes treasure.
He likes shiny, rare, valuable things.
Is that not what got him into this mess in the first place?
No matter.
The lucent, buttery sun breaches the horizon, splaying an array of vivid, impressionist colours across the sky, bleeding into one another, making shades he’s never before seen in a sunrise. (And he’s seen his fair share of sunrises.) Mauves. Violets. Tangerines. Lemons. Sapphires. Deep, velveteen blacks and blues to his rear where the sun has yet to shine her vaulted mandala of rays through the thickness of the island’s nights. He squits, tilts his head away from the impossible brightness of it, turning to look, once again, across the treeline in which he stands, half-in, half-out; hind feet sunk into rich, dark soil, held tight by myriad roots from big, lush tropical flora, front feet in shifting, bone-white sand.
Shadows, strange and long, cast back from the new sun, they are purplish and lively, and it seems to him at any moment they could unroot themselves from their corporeal prisons and take to searching themselves...
He walks on, weaving through trees—soil, sand; sun, shade—until it seems, heat having been dispersed across the yearning plains of his bright, white coat, he is ready to plunge back in. The forest is deep, thick, verdant and cool in the morning, pleasantly so. Darkly so. Strangely so. Odd birds of paradise sing in from their perches high above, lyre and harp songs, their string orchestras make for a beautiful dawn chorus. He begins to hum as he walks, joining their symphony, becoming one with the thrum of this place—around him, others wander, some feverish, some nonchalant; they all wander for the same reason, more or less. The prognostications of that young horse, that note, that statue: there’s a relic to be found. It mattered not to him that he was not familiar with the God, in whose forge that mystic thing may have been cast.
That’s beside the point.
He moves with hitched, albeit cavalier strides, waking up the aching bones of his body. He had slept, somehow, but he had not slept without fit, and his body felt the punishments of his thrashing against root and stone. When will this end? he wonders; the voice echoes back, ‘when you repent...’ but by then once-princeling has seen something glister in a mote of wan sunlight behind a wide-leaved fern, and does not hear it. He rushes forward, ruby eyes wide with seeking greed, underbrush grabbing at his grey ankles, snapping with his pull and tug.
It is nothing.
Just a jewelled bird who squawks in a light, baroque viola, and alights into the cool, morning air. He curses under his breath, “for Frith’s sake,” and waits for his breath to slow, before stepping once again into the ceaseless march for something unknown.
He likes shiny, rare, valuable things.
Is that not what got him into this mess in the first place?
No matter.
The lucent, buttery sun breaches the horizon, splaying an array of vivid, impressionist colours across the sky, bleeding into one another, making shades he’s never before seen in a sunrise. (And he’s seen his fair share of sunrises.) Mauves. Violets. Tangerines. Lemons. Sapphires. Deep, velveteen blacks and blues to his rear where the sun has yet to shine her vaulted mandala of rays through the thickness of the island’s nights. He squits, tilts his head away from the impossible brightness of it, turning to look, once again, across the treeline in which he stands, half-in, half-out; hind feet sunk into rich, dark soil, held tight by myriad roots from big, lush tropical flora, front feet in shifting, bone-white sand.
Shadows, strange and long, cast back from the new sun, they are purplish and lively, and it seems to him at any moment they could unroot themselves from their corporeal prisons and take to searching themselves...
He walks on, weaving through trees—soil, sand; sun, shade—until it seems, heat having been dispersed across the yearning plains of his bright, white coat, he is ready to plunge back in. The forest is deep, thick, verdant and cool in the morning, pleasantly so. Darkly so. Strangely so. Odd birds of paradise sing in from their perches high above, lyre and harp songs, their string orchestras make for a beautiful dawn chorus. He begins to hum as he walks, joining their symphony, becoming one with the thrum of this place—around him, others wander, some feverish, some nonchalant; they all wander for the same reason, more or less. The prognostications of that young horse, that note, that statue: there’s a relic to be found. It mattered not to him that he was not familiar with the God, in whose forge that mystic thing may have been cast.
That’s beside the point.
He moves with hitched, albeit cavalier strides, waking up the aching bones of his body. He had slept, somehow, but he had not slept without fit, and his body felt the punishments of his thrashing against root and stone. When will this end? he wonders; the voice echoes back, ‘when you repent...’ but by then once-princeling has seen something glister in a mote of wan sunlight behind a wide-leaved fern, and does not hear it. He rushes forward, ruby eyes wide with seeking greed, underbrush grabbing at his grey ankles, snapping with his pull and tug.
It is nothing.
Just a jewelled bird who squawks in a light, baroque viola, and alights into the cool, morning air. He curses under his breath, “for Frith’s sake,” and waits for his breath to slow, before stepping once again into the ceaseless march for something unknown.
