STRUCK ME AS EXTREMELY FRIENDLY GHOSTS.
There is no vulture.
Still, Eik hears a vulture laughing. A rough cackle, almost less like laughter and more like the regurgitation of the ribs of a sand fox. The grey stallion’s ears lower--
(a chorus of laughter rises from the back of his skull, it harmonizes with the hacksaw laughter of the vulture that is not there. no. no– not this, stop– stop laughing)
-- and they pin to his skull when Mathias snarls “don’t touch me.”
“Gladly,” he says with his own halfhearted flash of teeth. Eik didn’t need to be asked (no, commanded) anyway, he had already decided it was a fruitless effort.
(Eik knows how sometimes kindness, in its own strange way, could be a cruelty. But it would never stop him from trying, as stupid and foolish as it was, to be kind. (He hated his kindness. But so did the voices, the laughing, snarling, mocking voices, and it gave him such satisfaction to shock and disgust them.))
The grey stallion kneels to maneuver the full, heavy water bags over his back. Nearby, flies gather at a wet-red feast. The mad flutter of their wings creates a buzzing, frenzied song, thick enough that within its darkness other sounds take form-- crying, laughing-- each fast and subtle, come and gone before the mind can identify it.
Eik shakes his head but they keep buzzing, louder and louder, the inescapable madness.
Anywhere but here sounds like a fine destination, especially Delumine. Plenty of water there, and food. A notable lack of dictators, too. But it was a lot of sand to cross, and an empty stomach would make the desert seem three times as big as it was. "Good luck," Eik grunts as he stands on starving legs. "We should split up. I go south, you go north?" He does not fail to notice the other man carries two skins, and he does want to ask more but-- it doesn't really matter, does it?
And so it became one more exercise in learning how to not care.
FROM THE SAME FAMILY
@
Time makes fools of us all
