[ Post a Response | Desreal ]
Posted by Herne on September 21, 2008, 1:47 am
121.127.201.238
Herne wasn't sure where he was, or how he got there.
The last three days were a blur of blood and heat and the buzz of flies, a dark and chaotic gap in his memory. He remembered running; he remembered fear. He remembered shapes on the horizon, dust hanging in the air, long shadows advancing. He remembered Arayh's rage, her despair, remembered that one, chilling moment when he realised that the sound ripping from her throat was not a roar but a scream. He remembered; he saw her go down beneath the press of bodies and (this he recalled very clearly) thought, we are lost. And then... nothing. Nothing but heat and stink and fear. And it almost killed him, because he knew. He was sure.
Hyddwn had died, and Herne couldn't remember seeing him fall.
Something tightened, twisted in his chest and he bit, savagely, into the inside of his own cheek. The taste of iron flooded his mouth. There was a tension running through the core of him, a nervous energy building up in his limbs; his hoof stamped and gouged the ground, impotent. He turned it over and over in his mind, flashes of light and colour, thick, ugly smells and uglier sounds. He saw Arayh fall as if her knees had broken from under her, heard her final, ragged cry. He felt pain blossoming in his shoulder, saw blood on the dirt and horses pressing close on every side. But that was all. No matter how hard or long he struggled, he could not remember when it was, exactly, that Hyddwn had fallen. There was nothing, no veil, not even a wall to be broken. Just... nothing.
The quietness of the woodland, the peace of it, made his skin crawl and it was then, only then, that he understood what kind of place he had come to. The Element. There was something below the wind, a presence in the air and a heat in the earth; it was a strange land, and wild. Why here, he wondered. Why, of all the places they had been, had his feet led him here?
Brown flashed before his eyes, muscle and bone and skin powering through air that had been empty a split second before and Herne leapt back, braced, as the deer bounded past. He stared after it as it disappeared into the undergrowth, vanishing soundlessly, as though it had never been. From his other side there came a slick, slithery sound and a thump, and he glanced that way, expecting to see another deer, albeit an unusually clumsy one.
Instead, a foal stepped between the trees. She looked around and asked, nose wrinkled, “Who’s there?”
“Nobody,” he replied, “nothing. A dream of a shadow of a thought, nothing more.”
It was her youth, he thought, that nettled him so. She was so very young, wide-eyed and wondering, and Herne… Herne was a hundred years old, and growing colder by the minute.
“And if I am such a thing,” he continued, idly, “then what on earth are you?”
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