chasing down the devil
♠︎ ♕ ♠︎
He wakes early, earlier than anyone gives him credit for.
The sky is still dark as he slips from the Scarab, and the air has a midwinter bite. But this near to the bay it is as temperate as anywhere in Denocte; tangible on the air is the sharp clean smell of pine and the almost metallic scent of a winter sea.
There is a fresh quilt of snow across the cobblestones and August relishes being the first to lay his tracks across it, though a pair of crows scolds him from a beech. He laughs back at them, then dips down an alley with a flick of his tail. His route is familiar as an alley-cats' when it steals from its mistress’s house, and his eyes are as keen; if there were any onlookers but birds it would be clear to them he knows where he’s headed.
As always August pauses when the narrow path spits him out into a wide street at the crest of a hill; it is not just the sea-breeze that suddenly whips at him that makes him catch his breath. No - it is the sight of the dock, all those jutting masts, a proud forest that rose and fell like breathing. His lungs fill like billowing sails, his eyes shine bright as the sun as it crests the horizon.
He might have stood there forever if a little jewel-bright dragon hadn’t darted up, snapping at his heels.
“Rude, Templeton,” he says, but he is grinning when the creature snorts a curl of smoke and leaps up to rest between his withers. With his passenger he walks on, down the hill between the buildings like a drop of sunlight until he stands amid the market stalls.
He is still one of the few on the streets; Denocte is a city of late nights and therefor late mornings, especially in this part of town. But the sellers are beginning to set out their wares, and another handful of dragons have joined him, multicolored jewels in the morning, following him like ducks follow a man with bread.
And it is bread he buys a moment later, exchanging a bright coin for a few loaves still warm from their clay oven. He might have spoken longer to Talan, the baker, if it hadn’t been for the clamor of the little dragons. “You’re worse than hens,” he tells them, but he crosses to a breeze-blocking tree and tears the first loaf into chunks, careful to be sure each dragon gets one.
August knows he is far from the only soft-hearted patron to feed the resident dragons - they do not know what hunger is - but he can’t begrudge them for it. He is a survivor, too, and anyway they make him laugh, they way they snarl and hiss like cats and lounge like tiny lions.
The city is starting to wake up, now, and the gulls and horses are all gabbering away, sharing the morning’s news, when he begins to wind back toward the Scarab with his basket of fresh bread. Each stride possesses the easy carelessness of a man well-comfortable in his place (and his body), and so when he freezes and swiftly turns his head it is almost startling, like a buck breaking for the treeline.
He thought he’d heard his name. That alone is not strange - August knows half the Night Court, and has his whole life - but it had sounded like his mother who’d said it.
And that, of course, is impossible.
@open | first post who dis
