but you said, come here, my bird!
i will give you the dangerous black night
i will give you the dangerous black night
T
he dampened earth gave beneath his feet. Soft, loamy, particles of sand crunched and packed as he stood before the tide line, his eyes distant over the silhouette of what became of the island. Perhaps he should have been surprised of its changing, of its shifting, of the uncharacteristic softness of its new form: the rolling hills, the emerald greens, the jungle given way to the occasional pine and boulder, and more lifeless shapes in between. Instead, he was unsettled by the quiet. There was no hum today, no roaring of falling stars or the undulating echos of thunder from the deep. For long he stood at the shores of what was once the land bridge, contemplating the silence, until his skin shuddered of itself in ripples and static waves. He meant to move against the shallows, but the shallows moved against him instead. There had been boats waiting at the shore, but he had despaired the last boat that carried him across the Terminus. It had little enjoyment to it – he would have rather swam, in retrospect, letting the brine crystallize in his mane and furs, feeling the current fight him like the furious beast that it is. It raised him now, though small whiteheads still brushed at his fetlocks and roared with disdain for its obedience. Each footstep was a damp clatter as if the ocean between the shore and the island was no more than a broad wet stone in which his reflection stored.
In it, his shadow had grown wild. For an entire season he had spent his vagrant life in the wilds on the brim of Denocte, in the woods between the lake and the mountains. It had been liberating, loosened from the sentry stalls and the battleground camps, Elysium chatter of hoarded gold and death in the prairie. His mane filled with burrs, his flesh with thorn-cuts, dandelion heads, pollen, his hair lengthened and sweeping in waves, dripping shadows that caressed the mirror-surface. With him no longer the smell of Night Market incense and Denoctian musk, but the smell of deep pine forests and cedar grain, of wind and earth and sky and ash, of lake water and meadow root, of stag leather and hare blood.
It was at the end of dusk when he first stepped into the world that was the island – and world indeed, for as many times as one may try to map it they would find that it stretched almost imperceptibly as they roamed, filled with notches and crooks and turns that wove and dove and upended. He did not doubt that the hills, were he to pass between them, would broaden and gape and route their valley into some treacherous gulley. The land pretended to be soft, but he knew better. (Were there not times in which rough things must pretend to be soft?)
There was little to be noted in the land of sculptures, except that when the wind settled and the calm fell in, therein became a stirring not unlike many voices at a whisper. He stopped then in a clearing surrounded by statues – some whole, some broken, one missing an ear and another with a cleft throat – and his ears flicked to gather the commune of sounds just barely comprehensible above the rustling of leaves.
@Danaë
