« don't die so far from the sea »
Orestes hears the running like a heartbeat
going
thud-dump
thud-dump
thud-dump
and wonders if it is the blood of his own heart rushing in his own ears. The sound causes the roadrunner to disappear; the buzzard to drift away; the lizards to disperse.
The wind is howling in the canyon; ravenous; hollow. It sounds like a Ghost that remembers what it felt like to live but cannot obtain touch it; the howling of a corpse for the blood of life with a thirst that cannot be sated. It sounds like the cursed pleading for something not so empty, as if by filling the pitted canyon with sound it might be given shape. He closes his eyes and feels the sun against his flesh, and he hears the heartbeat, the
thud-dump
thud-dump
thud-dump
until it stops, and hot breath wafts over his face. He smells decay; but it is sickly sweet, the rot of the forest or the sea. He does not open his eyes until she nickers at him in a way that does not belong to a horse, but something lupine, something that craves meat. Orestes stares at her; after a long moment he nickers back, but in that nicker there is an absence that marks him as something other; it breaks; it cuts; it reaches a crescendo pitch and then he steers it quickly away because yes, yes, yes
Orestes aches to keen back in an old language of forgotten people; he aches to answer her lupine song in the song of the sea but the sea, yes the sea, has long-since stopped singing for her Prince. He closes his eyes again. He does not sound like a horse; but he does not sound like what he once was. After a long moment he opens his eyes again, the blue-blue of something un-belonging, not of sand and sun, and Orestes stares at the fissures in her face as if they reveal the bone beneath the flesh, and he nearly asks, do you know?
He hates that when his eyes return to the red canyon walls he is remembering the sea. He hates that when he goes to speak he cannot.
At last, “You are not of Solterra.” Perhaps it is her otherness; perhaps it is the haunting curl of her scimitar tail or the way she smells unlike any horse he has ever known.
Orestes hates the way when he says it
it echoes in the canyon
as if the desert whispers,
neither are you.
@Thana / speaks / notes: text text
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