Wheeling Gull Isle treibloka

She carried the gannets despite his offers to help. Their pale plumage and eyes reminded him of her.

Greenhills. His echolalia was at first a matter of practicality in the training grounds, where voices often mingled with each other, where commands of patchwork languages failed to reach ears. By now it was merely a compulsion. 

You look like snegurochka with this otter scarf, he teased. She is girl made of snow from childrens' stories.

The wind gently combed through the grass, undulating in slow ripples up the slope. Reeds shook and bowed against it, the heavy heads of cattails flicking against his stomach. It felt a world away from the austere and bleak landscapes of his childhood and adolescence. He could see why she had invoked god.

It is so beautiful here, he wanted to say. But any sentence he could form felt hollow and useless compared to what he saw in front of him, a manifestation of the utopia he had always scoffed at. He broke into a jog, wanting to witness and feel more of it, to convince himself of its dayglow reality.