well any man with a microphone
can tell you what he loves the most
can tell you what he loves the most
August is beginning to get the feeling that he is lost.
Of course, this hardly bothers him at all; it’s an island, after all, and all he needs to do to find his way out is pick a direction and walk in a straight line until he hits the beach again. This, the palomino is confident, is well within his capabilities, and so he continues, unworried, taking in the forest around him with the air of a man visiting a zoo where the bars might vanish at any time.
The most unnerving part is the quiet. Long since has he passed out of earshot of a brook; its unnatural laughing was more eerie than comforting. Likewise there is no sound of waves, no cries of shorebirds, though the tang of salt is still a note in the bouquet of the island. Even the cacophonous birds seem to have fallen silent, and aside from the drone of insects there is only an infrequent, low whooping - the call of a monkey, maybe, or a bird, or a cat, for all he knows. Vik would have a field day here, if he’s poked his head out of his lab long enough to know the island exists.
It’s a little funny, too, that there are so many of them (countless, that stream of horses down the bridge, spilling like pearls onto the beach) and yet it had been so easy to find himself alone, hemmed in by trees three stories tall. If this were a story, the island would be sentient, and know exactly what it was doing, splitting them all off -
A new sound, the whining and yelping of a dog, jerks August’s head up, tilts his ears forward. There was no mistaking the tone of it, of danger and fear, and the palomino’s body is lunging him forward through the brush and brambles before his mind can say no, wait, let’s evaluate the situation. It’s enough to slow him down, at least, and not crash like an elephant onto the scene; he tries to be subtle, or as subtle as a man as gold as a coin can be in a green forest, tripping like a boy over roots.
And then he hears that dreadful voice, and it’s enough to make him wish he weren’t quiet at all.
Bones in its path -
we are dust, we are dust…
It’s like a witch’s voice, like a tree’s voice, and pitched with the whining of the dog it makes all the hairs stand up along his spine. Then he is there, a clearing that is no clearing at all but a mass of gnarled roots and dead ground beneath a monstrous tree. His glance is too quick for detail; there is another figure, and a trunk like a nightmare carved into the bow of a ship, and there is the dog and a mare thrashing in the dirt.
“Steady now,” he says, stopping just of out reach of those big feathered feet, his gaze darting between that of the dog and the shuddering-lidded eyes of the mare. “It’s going to be okay,” he says loudly, soothingly, unaware he’s echoing the words of the Borzoi. There is little more he can do, at the moment, and so he lifts his silver-eyed gaze to search the scene - and freezes when at last his mind makes sense of the silver woman.
For a moment his jaw falls slack and he is nothing but a weanling boy, listening to stories of the sea in a weatherbeaten tavern as the wind howls outside and the tide crawls in. And then he shakes his head and then dips it, a little bow, the closest thing to a grin he can give when there’s a stranger having some sort of episode (we are dust, we are dust) between the two of them.
“Hello, Captain,” he says, and his brows lift in a way that continues to speak, but says only what the fuck?
@Locust @Kassandra
