Desreal: Though they go mad, they shall be sane.

No more may gulls cry at their ears
or waves break loud on the seashores;
where blew a flower may a flower no more
lift its head to the blows of the rain.

Skord walks through the thickly forested valleys of the place they call Desreal. His long limbs move slowly, his hulking frame made hazy and listless in the thick humid air. It runs thick sweating fingers through his soft dark fur, touching his heavily tangled locks with hot gaping mouths slack with salacious lusts. With feline grace and languor his broad black hooves part the rich grasses underfoot but step with sounds muted and soft. He feels the moist earth swell up beneath him, the thick earthy scent disturbed by his passing hanging around him, heavy with the nauseating sweetness of decay.
His sleek body is young and supple, and his coiled muscles shy from outstretched branches that claw and cling. The trees about him bend and shake, unsettled by his passing; they whisper in gentle susurration, their soft voices tinged with fear and disgust. Devastation hands palpably about his dark body, a shroud of desolation; a hungry, gloating fever of blood. The black pits of his gaze are luminous, liquid and listening. Blood-black, alive with rancor and revolt, they burn with inexplicable darkness; consuming; ravenous with macabre desires. Blasphemous fires twist the awful corridors of his winedark eyes, a dead light; two blackhole suns that burn with malice and hatred and spite.
Strangely though, in a way that seems out of place with his sly predators stalk and his glassy, glittering stare, sadness fills his livid gaze in a way that lends an air of great age and despair. Slinking through the mottled halflight cast by the trees, Skord feels distant and cold. His sweating skin feels the breath of winter – winters past, long years gone – and his stiffly twitching ears hear the whispering voices of the dead.
Suddenly, Skord steps from the cover of the trees into a clearing tightly wound with willow and cypress. The carefree giggle of a lively stream, running heavy with stormwater, sounds cold and mocking to his haunted ears. Skord laughs in reply, his voice bitter and asperous, mocking; afflicted by a winter intonation. In the heavy silence of the wood it fades into a poisonous hiss. When he raises his head, thick forelock curtaining a skull almost feminine in its delicate beauty, the scents that curl to his flared nostrils are all old and stale; cold. Dead.
Stony, Skord faces a field of bones, long bleached and smoothed by years of sun, moon, wind, drought. He bows his head to them, eyes never moving from the heavy piles of these ancient sacrifices. The air is heavy with death. He feels faint. He feels cold and detached, hot and intimate. The dead surface around him, crawling, clawing, viscous and slithering. He shivers and sighs and his sigh is a venomous gasp, sepulchral and raw.
“They don’t honor you any longer, do they my friends?” His whisper is a thick velvet purr, full of sorrow and pain, echoing with the bitter longing of the dead as they climb in his mane and slide down his throat.

Skord
Dead mean naked they shall be one
with the man in the wind and the west moon;
when their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
they shall have stars at elbow and foot.