Shimmering Sands 널 다시 갖고 싶은 내 마음

Twenty days.

Time, for the inky ingénue, had ceased to pass in a series of measurable, definable increments and had melted into an undulating pattern of pain and weariness. She followed the sprightly Atoll’s instructions with a feverish desire to please, keeping the ugly wounds free of debris and sand, applying poultices of yarrow, and soothing the healing punctures in the sweet snowmelt of the river when she was not bathing them in the brine of the roiling sea. The savagery of the Blackrock Depths pack was made garishly evident by the metallic scent of fresh blood that spattered their borders; and Coelacanth dared not visit her bright-eyed friend while the bloodthirsty beasts wrought such tumult, for she did not wish to rouse the ire of the razor-fanged wolves the siren of Tara knew as family. The atramentous sheepdog cross had seen the warhounds’ leader once — a tall, towering behemoth, broad of shoulder and hulking of stature, with malice writ upon the unforgiving lines of his face. His markings were odd — bands of salt white against a starless, stygian landscape, like the gills of a shark or the convex bones that caged his foul heart. He was an impressive titan of the sea and handsome in his own way, a sight that Seelie’s lore-loving relatives would have relished.

And she had seen Hind’s daughter, her friend, the girl who called her “Shadow” — and her heart had ached with an unanswerable, unspeakable loneliness.

A sheepdog without a flock, a wolf without a pack — nothing in Coelacanth’s genetic makeup, muddled and mixed though it was, could have prepared her for the yawning, heartsick void in her life where Amoxtli used to be. Her catlike, delicate paws flowed in a frail legato stride over meters upon meters of gritty salt, the feathers between her toes tangling stickily with crystals of sodium. She had returned here to do what she had not been strong enough to do before — to look upon the den that she had shared with her brother and accept that he was truly gone. It was necessary, she knew, to give herself wholly over to grief; the pressure in her chest grew at times so painful that she found it difficult to breathe. Her appetite had withered significantly, lending her already delicate musculature a waiflike air, and although she spent much of her time resting, lessening her caloric intake requirement, she could scarcely afford to lose more weight than she already had. She would see Amoxtli again someday — she knew she would! — but not if she died of her own neglect.

Nosing through the granules at the mouth of their den, the ink-feathered girl blinked as she adjusted to the sudden dimness; the scent of her brother was everywhere, but whether it was fresh or not she could not say. Curling her tiny body around his treasures, she trembled with the force of her loneliness for him before throwing back her head and “howling” — a tremulous, wavering cry that spilled again and again from her lips as tears streamed down her velveteen cheeks. Finally, at long last, the little Groenendael lay her finely-sculpted head upon her tired paws, hiccupping sobs causing her exaggeratedly concave sides to flutter until they evened out with dreamless, exhausted slumber.