[ What Do You Have To Say? | Ni'Srilan: The Desert ]
Posted by Ebaran on January 11, 2009, 9:55 am, in reply to "1234"
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Ebaran is a creature for whom laughing comes easily, like a duck into water, or Huyana into the ocean, he suspected. It is not a mannerism without precedent. If you mine the annuals of mythology and uncover the dangerous form of Elegba, God of cross-roads, of the gates to death, of unpredictable violence, you shall find his face locked in a jovial cackle. It was the jester Loki that gave birth to Fenris the Sun Eater and World Ender, and everyone knows that bared skulls have the widest smiles. Ebaran’s languid bone-white neck baked beneath the sun as he nosed forward slightly to examine Huyana’s momentary surprise. He would leave it to her to inject some life into his contrived witticisms through reciprocity.
Ebaran was delighted, absolutely delighted at the mare’s perfect little smirk. He smiled along with her and let his preoccupations slip from him as he leapt further into their conversation. “Solira,” he tested the word on his lips as to remember it. He brushed aside the pause that came after it, but not without noting it. “I fear I am rather a nobody from nowhere, or more specifically Ebaran who does little from Canton and this place more recently.” Where Huyana was prudently guarded, Ebaran was bothered by no similar burden. If someone asked him at this very moment why he was here, where he had come from, why he looked upon each dune and crag as if it was familiar, Ebaran would have found it particularly difficult to avoid being absolutely forthright. He had waited so long to be in the position he was now, to stand in the belly of the elements… none of them knew the joy he felt at his good fortune, the calm he enjoyed now that his path was set, and Ebaran worried that it would be intolerably miserly to refuse to share if pressed.
Yet, there was so much to lose for lack of silence. Thinking on this, Ebaran let his hooves slide against the rolling grains of red sand that even now danced across his back with the help of the wind. The lidless sun of a thousand summers had baked into each vibrant grain of sand, and if you held just one up to the light, crystalline, those suns would spring forth and cast their spectrums across the ground. The warmth of those suns diffused across his soles and thrummed against his pasterns as he let his feet sink into the sand. He remembered what it felt like to stand alone on the windiest nights to listen to the sound the sand made when it was ripped inch by inch from the top of the dune. It was a half a moan of mourning for the dune that now lay destroyed and half a song of joy for the new one that was to be created. Waves in the sand, chasing after one another at the pace of groaning behemoths while the quick pock-marks of hoof prints exist as nothing more than skittering gnats against the sheer magnitude of the desert’s ancient rhythms.
Ebaran joked with Huyana about the lifeless nature of the desert, but he knew better. And for all his desire to be as open in his glee as possible, he knew that doing so might cost him his place here, that all his work to return might be cast asunder by simple honesty, his most natural element as a creature of laughter. As another screen of suspended sand found roost in the white hide of his haunch, Ebaran kept to pleasant conversation.
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