Swiftcurrent Creek your heart [m]

“”

Silence.

They were infinitesimal and savage, godlike beings that trod down the grasses and stirred the loam into mud with the slow weep of their wounds. At length, the moon unfurled her ivoried banner across the heavens, and they were caught up, enraptured by the play of glistening light across each pale hair.

For how long they had moved across the land, the madman did not know. A being conscious of its fleshly self would have noted with growing horror the lacerations upon the sole of each paw, where the stone lips of countless mountains had worn away the skin there, and thus the stained beast left a trail of crimson smudges in his wake.

But now they had come into the god-sphere — he walked without pain, untouched by fear, even as the gentle bite of night air swept tufts of dead fur from a pelt blotched hopelessly black by months' old blood, even as the click of bone against bone in the body that was propelled solely by the infernal light of Sos sounded painfully into the night.

Icewater eyes skimmed the night, plying its shadows with an empty stare; slow moments slid past as the shaman turned his attentions toward his companion. Silk and moonbeams, madness turned to glimmering honey — she was his. Blood of his blood, long since removed from her dam, the name of which the pale man could not remember.

He appraised her for a long breath, pupils expanded beneath the plant he had fed to the both of them before they had departed. Its bitterness still flickered vaguely across his tongue, and he lolled it in a halfsmile, though he made no true effort to reach toward she who was fully locked into the crystalline palace of her own mind.

And so, turning forward, he led them again, hips jutting and ribs razor-edged against the tattered grasp of bloodied fur and skin that was his lot. On the horizon, the moonglow beckoned, unearthing a copse of trees from the nightfall, and it was toward the verdant stand that the madman sidled, never once casting a glance behind himself for the soft footsteps of his comrade, for he sensed that she would come despite the murmured urgings of her tortured mind.