You can tell, you can tell, you can absolutely tell
I’m pushing everything about me up one hell of a hill
I’m pushing everything about me up one hell of a hill
Sabrina thinks the desert is boring.
First of all, it's all one color, something reminiscent of the scratchy, sickly noodle shade of her hair-- and about the same texture, too. It rasps against her flesh as she pushes onward through the undulating dunes, jaw clenched in a caged ferocity, unwilling to let the environment get the better of her. She’s parched and sore and blistered in spots, and she thinks tips of her uppermost primaries are beginning to color black, like something baking, taken in the heat of the oven.
It’s a mystery to her, this strange obsession with the desert, why she kept coming back here, to this god-forsaken place of all places; but she knows she goes to the shitty places first because she doesn’t want to encounter them later in her journey, when she’s weaker, tired, and kind of lift her lip and go, ehh, and turn away.
She doesn’t want to face that golden ghost at the end of the tunnel as he glared at her with summer-green eyes. You promised you’d bring her home.
What if she was here, at the ass-end of nowhere? What if her kidnappers had locked her away in some sneaky, freaky sand vault? A temple buried under a trillion-million grains of golden silt, and she the jewel at it’s center.
Delph was always special. Sabrina was just the afterthought.
Though, she couldn’t imagine being more tired than she is now. Her back is sore and her wings are heavy and she’s just slammed her pastern into something hard sticking up out of the sand; she stomps it again, a few times for good measure, before she realizes it’s bone. She sticks her horn-- gilded, useless garbage, like the rest of this place-- through an eyehole and hoists it from where it’s half-buried in dirt. It’s some sort of predator, she realizes when it plops harmlessly back to earth where she tossed it. It has a set jaw and sharp, sharp fangs, polished pearly in the swell of the dunes, and Sabrina can imagine it grinning, hungry, in the dark, just before whatever it hunted escaped its jaws.
She rolls her eyes and lets her head fall back, sighing into the empty, soulless sky.
One sharp step and she smashes it, sending it sinking into the sand in three parts.
She’s thinking about the futility of it all, the weight on her back and the way out of here when she sees him; she imagines he’s a mirage, at first, and thinks fuck I’ve been out in the sun way too long. He glimmers in the summer sun and moves like mist, impossible here in such a dry clime. And he’s golden in a way that makes her breath catch; and he’s walking in her direction, the motion filling her with fear, because she thinks he’s a ghost, she thinks he’s her ghost, and, boy, that wasn’t very much time at all, you impatient bastard.
But the sun shifts and glints off his antlers and he becomes more physical the closer he is and she snorts, loud, her irritation audible, and she feels stupid and shattered all at once.
She wants to go up to him and just punch him, clock him a good one in the jaw, for some unknown reason. But she doesn’t.
Instead, she approaches to peer at the bones at his feet, see if they matched the bones she'd found.
They didn't. “For as awful as this place is,” she says, voice a growl, “I can’t seem to stop running into people here.”
Mors was awfully crowded for the end of the fucking world.
