life's but a walking shadow
There was something strange about them, these two men, but Indra could not quite place exactly what. She had grown so accustomed, lately, to strangeness of the vast and earth-tilting variety that it had all but ceased to faze her; but gazing across the campsite at these two stallions edged in the flickering firelight, she was struck by how the small, mortal strangenesses of the world could be just as unnerving.
They did not seem right, for all that their Ilati trappings were as plain as the constellations shining high overhead—and yet those, too, seemed oddly awry, and Indra could not help but frown briefly up at the night sky. Was not the Riverdrake always visible at this time of year? And when had the Serpent slunk so close to the tip of the Sky Queen’s wing? It was as if the very heavens had been shifted—a feat that Indra doubted even the gods themselves could manage.
“The old ones,” she repeated aloud now, eyeing the Ilati elder curiously. “You mean the gods?” She shook her head, her mane gleaming like blood in the gold of the fire. “I have never spoken with them. I leave that to the Witch Doctor, and others touched by Vespera.” In truth, though she had been raised in many of the Ilatis’ ways, she had never joined in their worship of the deities. The world into which she had been born did not keep any gods but time, and magic, and the rift.
To the herbalist she offered a small, sideways tilt of the head, her iron horn flashing with light. “You do not live in the swamp with the others?” she asked him. “To which clan do you belong?” There were dozens, she knew, and while most kept within the borders of Tinea, a few had ventured further afield as the Ilati populations had burgeoned, testing their luck in the wilds of Terrastella and beyond.
She turned again to the masked elder curled beside the fire, struggling to remember whether she might have seen him before at a festival or other gathering. “Nahane will chastise me, for I have surely forgotten your face and name,” she suggested, “but I am pleased to have found your fire all the same. What trouble is it that you speak of, in the mountains?” For she had overheard their earlier words, as she approached, and she knew that there would be much she had missed in her absence. And then, because she didn’t exactly have much else on her agenda, she offered, “I could help to gather your blue blooms. But who is this Atatu?”
i n d r a
@Turhan @
