[ What Do You Have To Say? | Ni'Srilan: The Desert ]
Posted by Ebaran on January 11, 2009, 11:49 am, in reply to "1234"
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There was something unnerving about Kinh, though he was physically unassuming. He came towards Ebaran at a languid pace that barely shifted the mane that lay against his brown neck. The white criollo was driven by instinct to rock his weight back onto his haunches, ignoring the subtle crunch of impacted sand, though Kinh might have hear it. There was some violation in the way the motley brown horse looked at Ebaran with bemused knowing and a cuckold’s confidence bolstered by this land’s unnatural characteristics. Perhaps it was this uncomfortable edge to the beginnings of an innocuous conversation that lead Ebaran to take Kinh’s question in such a dark way. Had he seen anything strange around these parts? Ebaran had seen much come to pass here, and none of it normal. With a child’s eyes he had watched fallen Lords scabbering in the dust for some remnant of majesty; dunes seared straight off the ground by columns of fire; his own uncle murder his father in a hissing feud arbitrarily begun in madness and gruesomely ended. He had seen much in these lands that would qualify as strange before his mother had secreted him away, cursing the elements with every gasp she managed in the course of their desperate flight.
There were good reasons Ebaran remained yet untouched by the pervasive grasp of this land’s power, good reasons for him to preserve whatever purity he could manage.
But then Kinh looked away to study the dunes, turning that probing gaze to other matters. Ebaran was not the sort of cat that could long hold a Halloween arch once the dog was gone; he snorted the breath he had been holding and followed Kinh’s gaze. “New is a relative term”, Ebaran mentioned casually as he rolled off his haunches and popped a hoof at the fetlock, cocking his hip in languid comfort. “To that dune there, the saguaro is new, and to that plateau the dune is new, and when the wind whips through this place it thinks that plateau is still a child suitable for molding. Yet that cactus began growing long before your father first looked at your mother in a gentlemanly way.” Ebaran smiled as he looked at Kinh from beneath the shade of his jauntily eschew forelock, perhaps he was not entirely done with claws?
“Though, in respect to fairness, I’m new enough I don’t yet know this desert’s name”, Ebaran continued in a conciliatory manner. Ebaran enjoyed the art of conversation and he launched fully into it, prattling on to dispel the last vestiges of his initial unease. By the time he returned to Kinh’s question he was able to convince himself that there had been nothing strange at all in the other horse’s gaze, and no reason to think that the question meant any more than the words that constituted it. He took a different route and a soft tone.
“Strange? I have seen a jack rabbit beat off a coyote and saguaro bloom pink flowers, but stranger still I have recently met a seemingly upstanding horse without a whiff of proper introduction.” Ebaran held his own little smile, let Kinh feel uncomfortable for the moment.
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