come with me into the field of sunflowers

[Sarkan]

Sarkan The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.   He’d come here for the island. The tales he’d heard had been difficult to believe, even to a man who had traveled a dozen countries and seen a hundred strange things. Fever-dreams, they sounded like, yet the sailors were emphatic. The island had shown up one day in a cloud of black smoke, visible for miles - A god had made it, and had sacrificed kings on it - Birds spoke in languages they could understand, creatures were formed of sand and leaves that blinked and walked - It was a blessing, it was a curse - Sarkan had smiled then as he smiled now. It did not seem that the island was as intriguing for the people of Novus themselves; there were only two sets of tracks on the snow-laden bridge. A child’s small half-moon’s, and a wolf’s. Sarkan had paused to smell the tracks, considering them a long while, wishing he could tell how near together they’d been made. Certainly it seemed that the wolf was following the child, the way the imprints would sometimes wander but always return, and the thought of it made the winter wind nip a little harder at him. He began to lope, then, an unmissable figure running down the bridge, his coat as mottled white and gray as the sky and his eyes as dark blue as the cold cold sea. When he reached the island he stopped only to draw on his cloak, though he left the hood down, long streams of silver blowing from his nostrils. It was quiet, amid the trees. The birches watched him with their thousand black eyes, and the pine trees shifted, near-black against the snow, and sometimes when he looked up he could swear the trees had switched places. He heard no other sound but the wind in the branches and the shush of the sea. He did not see the sunflowers. But he heard the laughter. A child’s laughter, deep and full. After the first moment, when his head had lifted, ears twisting, nostrils flaring in surprise, he breathed out a long sigh of relief. Still alive, then, and close. Now, as he stepped toward the source of the noise, he was cautious. When the birds began to sing, he realized he recognized none of them. And when he saw the child - a girl-child, a unicorn (and here his gut did give an uncomfortable twist; perhaps he felt guilty after all), and the white wolf beside her, he fell completely still. He did not see sunflowers. But a field of twisting thorns, their barbs long and cruelly hooked, black and green and crimson. Sarkan’s gaze shifted back to the girl, and then to the wolf. “What do they sound like to you?” he said, and gave no sign he heard nothing at all. @Aspara