Mount Apikuni death walks among you

@Lucy ♥

Though he believed himself fully recovered from the fever dreams of walking trees and stone birds, the wolf found himself overwrought by a need he was incapable of understanding. He had no way of knowing what had truly transpired: that he’d been drugged, slowly and deliberately, until finally his body developed a dependency to the herb and the woman who offered it. He misconstrued it, falling neatly into the trap that had been so carefully laid, and believed firmly that he needed Her — but when he tried to remember Her, he saw Easy’s face, knowing all the while that it wasn’t right. She wasn’t right. She wasn’t the blue-eyed girl.

Words came more clumsily to his tongue. The long months alone had already taken their toll, and compiled with the hunger and the knitting ribs and the longing and the hurt — sometimes the ache went deeper than his flesh, burrowing into his bones and the roots of his teeth — and sometimes the pounding of his head was violent enough to make his eyes water — and all too often it bent him double and folded him up, small and insignificant. Always he was hungry, but most days he was too sick to keep down what he managed to forage and scavenge. Always he was desperately lonely, and sometimes, on the really bad days, the eyes were jade or turquoise or gold and She became He — but the only name he knew was Easy.

He hated her sometimes, that girl who was never the girl.

He leaned forward, standing at the deceptively innocent creek’s edge, and as his lips touched the water a shiver ran through him and he recoiled violently —

this place —

this place!

He whipped around, his baleful brimstone eyes faraway, pupils swallowed up by a tidal wave of sickly yellow. Now he remembered — this creek — he’d stopped here on his way back from…well, somewhere — a push from behind and he’d been swept away by the vicious current. At least, he thought it was this river. Utterly turned around, his ears and eyes strained toward the west — but the nearest mountain also bore a sense of deep-seated wrongness.

Thoroughly agitated, the wolf curled in on himself to lay down, turning his head away from the river to lap at a dirty puddle of thawing snow. He couldn’t trust his own memories, but he still couldn’t bring himself to drink from the river and risk turning his back.

Not even when he was alone.