Ni'Srilan: The Desert: Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

“Oh,” is what Kinh says, quite stoic for a creature who just learned that his companion is a cannibal. He offers a dilapidated smile on his board-like face, an expression only the old can give the young. Kinh, of course, is not old - he is not even close - but he feels so, blissfully close to death and Elsewhere, beside the strange, deformed youth. His modest gaze sweeps tenderly across the jeweled grains of sand, each with a core of mica at its heart, dazzling beneath the sun. The oasis is beautiful, he supposes, full of life or the promise of it - but he likes the vast desert tundra better, the shadows with death winking around the corner.

What he lacks in voice, he makes up for in curious, curious, condemnable thought.

“I see,” he tells the child, the broken-limbed and broken-hearted, quiet face unaffected by his bold statements. He still has a child’s arrogance and a child’s impotence; Kinh does not fault him for that, does not even laugh. It is something to be regarded with quiet acceptance like he accepts the saguaro and its spiny, tender lengths, and the desert sparrows that haunt his sleeping-places to awake him with the tunes of Welcome Sun and Goodbye Moon. As the earth will move on, the birds will fall from the sky and mold back into the earth from whence they came, and the cacti will shatter and its old, crinkled spines will from its arms to haunt the dunes, so will Alerion renounce his naivety, as Kinh long renounced his. “Well,” Kinh muses, and if he were a human he would be chewing on a long blade of alfalfa right about now, disquietingly calm, “so am I, of course.” Which is true, in a way different than what Alerion meant; when he meets death he will be food and his bones will be dust, and to scavengers or predator he will be new life, and so in the belly of the cougar and beak of the vulture he will find eternity.

His black hoof scrapes absentmindedly at the bank and his muzzle draws around to his side, leaving a trail of dark wetness across the country of his skin. Alerion is right: these are the easy, simple motions of one who does not know the strange ways of the Element, one who is as simple and yet as exquisite as the earth that molded him, one that knows much but says little. Still, if Kinh is aware of his strangeness to these people, he says nothing of it. They do not bother him, not really; they intrigue him, with their beguiling expressions and idioms and beliefs about extraterrestrial magic when they have forgotten to study the very intrinsic nature that crawls through their veins like liquid wildfire. But he does not fear though, though nor does he love them; he simply is, as much as any creature can be.

“Yep,” he agrees easily, reaching down now to take another drink of water. The wind pushes its way through a dry stack of brush behind them and a brown ear flicks back warily, but he doesn’t move. “I’m not.” A shrug ripples across his sloping shoulder, easygoing and unaffected, just like the rest of him.

“As for our lives,” he considers, “I think they are less different than they seem.” He knows nothing, of course, about the circumstances of the child’s birth or the dramatics that haunted his family. Then, he doesn’t care, not really. “You know these sands, right, these dunes? Before I was two I knew the grasslands of my home the same way.” He could say, and once, I, too, held the world in my eyes; but he doesn’t, doesn’t want to, couldn’t even if he did. That is too much presumption, not enough care – instead he shifts and smiles gently, head inclined in that easy, surefooted way again, wondering if the child will prove him wrong.