Desreal: Your tongue befouls its tune.

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 senses her behind him, his cold skin prickling with the vestiges of whatever powers he once held. They are, however, long gone – like all that he once knew of this place. He steps away as she nears, his vulturine frame sliding into the lee of a grandfatherly willow. Its long trailing fingers tangle malignly into his hair, and track paths of stinging sweetness across his shoulder and back, leaving a golden powder of pollen and catkin fur. He lingers at its edge, keeping carefully clear of the treacherous roots it throws towards the stream, and the brooding malice of its ancient trunk.
As the mare steps from the deepening shadows into the hazy afternoon light, Skord gazes back at her with a stare unconsciously sardonic; disdainful. His maroon eyes boil with alchemical fumes, venomous and black, and his stalwart body is coiled and poised like that of a serpent intent upon sin. The cloaked recesses of his winedark gaze are wild and arcane, glinting with the shards of withheld violence, sadism consumed, as they drink the vision of this two-toned mare come to intrude upon his homage to the dead.
And you have not? is what he wants to sneer in reply to her words, but he holds his tongue from hasty scorn and merely returns his gaze to the overflowing mounds of discarded bones. This whole place has been to him like the vague memory of a dream that, on waking, has sifted away like windblown sand, and this particular clearing though filled with great meaning, is only a small part of the pain in the back of his mind. Skord no longer feels pain. His kohled mahogany skin is too cold to care for it, and he has nurtured its beautiful agony for far too long. Like a terrible vision, filled with rivers swollen with blood, Skord is a morbid dream – bu t the home to which he has returned seems more so. Perhaps it is only too fitting that the first denizen of these realms that he has seen bears the likeness of one long gone, that half-crazed lover of his dam, whose painted skin might almost be worn flayed by this female.
“I don’t think so.” He replies, in a voice like the breath of the desert, harsh and hot. “I lived here once, many years ago, but there are none here who know me. I am Skord.” He looks back at her and his black eyes describe the lie of her skin, touching upon her with eyes that are hungry – like the wolf that has starved in the winter and now hunts children in the woods. They lick with mocking tenderness across the planes of her face before he looks away again.
Skord seems fierce and wild as he steps suddenly out from his refuge of the willow, golden dust floating about him and burs tangled in his coarse, heavy mane. Apparently careless of the mare’s presence, he steps warily amongst the bones that litter the clearing until he comes to a skeleton almost intact, lying discarded apart from the others. Its neck is broken, and slightly further off lies its skull with jawbone shattered. He lowers his head and lips at the crushed fragments of bone, his long black mane like an oilspill across the ivoried eye sockets and teeth. He takes a piece gingerly, cracks it in his mouth and it falls to dust between his lips and throat.
“I honor you, uncle.” He whispers only to the grasses that twine about the skeletal frame, and the spiders that live between the vertebrae, for he knows the soul is gone.
Skord looks back at the mare, haunting eyes unbridled – repulsive and terrible in their passion and turbulence.
“What would you know about what has been forgotten?” His words hold the sneer that his voice does not. It is only the warm and languorous purr of a contented cat, the savage hot rush of summer storms. “You people. You live here, but you know nothing.”

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.