September 01, 2024, 07:01 PM
(This post was last modified: September 01, 2024, 07:36 PM by Qiao.)
single replies welcome, just tucking this into qiao's threadlog as i catch up from my vacation <3 set for tonight (9/1/2024)
waning crescent. nearly time. tomorrow the sky would close in on the moon and swallow it in its blackness. a rebirth, the earth's cycling of a new age born from the ashes of the freshly deceased. qiao marked the moon's progress across a constellation of ancient stars with rheumy eyes and wondered how many lights had snuffed out in her lifetime.
the effigies and artefacts were prepared. eset recovered. there would be little use for her much longer. time, in all its fluidity, had a way of drawing doors shut, and qiao could feel these halls shrink like the constricting belly of a colubrid digesting its last meal.
no, it would not be much longer.
she placed the owl pellet to dry on the back of a rough stone. alongside it sat the three quills collected before she'd met lestan, a hawk's wizened limb with its talons curled a death-clutch, and a soft bundle of bluestem weaved with chicory root.
in the corner of the room, the wolf-skull glowered. qiao's eye was drawn to him -- her luckless companion through countless roads, raids, wars, and respites. so many journeys across so many lifetimes. to her, the great framing of his eye sockets appeared incredibly sad.
ha ha, gone soft, have we?the crone spoke to the skull's lingering spirit, but for once the prattle of his voice was disapprovingly silent. there was a bitterness to that space between them that seemed delightfully ironic -- had his soul finally grown a heart?
she turned back to the effigies and spat three times, drawing a halo around the stone with her claw. three claw marks were dragged into the dry earth from the hawk's talons towards the east.
when qiao was done, she slipped on the greenbrier torc that holstered the wolf's skull to her neck. the wind rattled overhead, producing a sigh that rifled her fur and whistled between the lobes of the skull's high arches.
it was nearly time to wake the children.
September 01, 2024, 07:30 PM
(This post was last modified: September 01, 2024, 07:32 PM by Rowdy.)
that night he has a dream that he is at the edge of water. the dream moves in sequences he does not understand.
first, he is something tall and reptilian and all-together unrecognizable from the soft body he's grown into. his fur is gone, his claws are longer than he remembers, and while he cannot see his face he knows it has changed to something narrow-snouted and menacing, like the front face of a pike.
he is running through the forest but the forest is changing around him. he is chasing something that runs like a deer but does not look like one and just as he jumps upon it the ground beneath them falls and he is falling and falling and falling --
and he lands mid stride but his body is different now. his legs are white and there is snow falling softly as he chases someone -- a friend or maybe mate -- through fist-sized snowflakes falling from a hazy sky.
then he is transported again and once more senses a change in his body: he is stone -- no -- someone sitting on a stone -- as a red she-wolf flashes her teeth at him, the interrupted stump of her tail raised over her body as she leaps --
the vision withers like smoke on the wind and now he is underwater, the long red arm of that she-wolf pinning him -- he is fighting and kicking but she holds him fast so his lungs fill with ice water and his head bursts with a pain he has never known.
then she dissipates again and he is in the sky, long wings black and fluttering between blades of wind. beneath him two wolves are running, black and red, but it is not a game and he senses in his heart that if the black one catches up to the red one it is all over --
that image too fades and he is transported again, this time back on earth. he thinks these are memories -- or maybe they are things that happened happening again -- but this time he recognizes the mountain in the distance. he is the air; a different red wolf so much like the first is walking through a field of burnt summer-grass. she freezes and he becomes aware of two other shapes, their bodies so intimate and so familiar to him that for a moment his heart is filled to burst with a profound sense of longing and loss --
mama! papa! he reaches for them but that image fades too, the way driftwood pulls away in rough water. he knows he will not see them again.
now he is over a field with small, dark shadows stippling it. as the smoky image clears he realizes these are not shadows but bodies -- thousands and thousands of bodies -- there is a burning stench to the air, the smell of rot and infection, and though he cannot see them, he hears screams and the clash of teeth. the field is endless; it spans on as far as he can look -- and as he peers closer he sees that there are small bands of coyotes moving through the endless rows of the dead. he thinks they could be survivors, but as they stop and kick over a corpse he gasps, for they are taking things from these bodies and killing the ones that still cling to life.
he is amazed by how tenuous the fallen's grasp on life is, how loosely their will seems to slip away from their bodies -- and he can see their spirits as they slip from mounds of flesh hacked to bits, some still twitching, their faces framed in death grimaces that he cannot escape. these spirits join the thousand-strong beads of light that rise into a sky so red it drowns with blood.
he has had enough of these visions but they keep coming -- he has finally recognized the rhythm and pace of each new apparition: it is a lifetime and yet, a single pump of blood through a visceral heart. he can feel this image trickling away too and he is all to eager to leave this field of red and black behind.
just as the landscape begins to change he sees a familiar shape move among the coyotes. her back is hunched and she is younger but it is distinctly her; her face is framed in blood and around her neck is a beaded strip of flesh holding offal and packs of moss. she jerks her head back and rowdy gasps, for her eyes flit to the space he occupies and the sage green of that brutal stare cuts right through him and says i know you are there.
but she is gone as quick as she had come and now he is on the back of some great giant. the ground is rolling out behind him and as he listens he knows he is not a wolf but a stag -- there upon the softly rolling back of a green hill ahead stands the lone figure of a black doe.
rowdy wakes with a gasp. his tongue is leaden and the sour taste of plant matter clings to the edge of his mouth. already, the dream is distant and the images are passing into his subconscious like riverwater through a sieve. his heart is pounding against his bony chest like war-drums, adrenaline is stinging the edge of his tongue and making him salivate -- but as he sits there the nightmare slips away and in steps qiao, his dinner held neatly between her pin-prick teeth.
first, he is something tall and reptilian and all-together unrecognizable from the soft body he's grown into. his fur is gone, his claws are longer than he remembers, and while he cannot see his face he knows it has changed to something narrow-snouted and menacing, like the front face of a pike.
he is running through the forest but the forest is changing around him. he is chasing something that runs like a deer but does not look like one and just as he jumps upon it the ground beneath them falls and he is falling and falling and falling --
and he lands mid stride but his body is different now. his legs are white and there is snow falling softly as he chases someone -- a friend or maybe mate -- through fist-sized snowflakes falling from a hazy sky.
then he is transported again and once more senses a change in his body: he is stone -- no -- someone sitting on a stone -- as a red she-wolf flashes her teeth at him, the interrupted stump of her tail raised over her body as she leaps --
the vision withers like smoke on the wind and now he is underwater, the long red arm of that she-wolf pinning him -- he is fighting and kicking but she holds him fast so his lungs fill with ice water and his head bursts with a pain he has never known.
then she dissipates again and he is in the sky, long wings black and fluttering between blades of wind. beneath him two wolves are running, black and red, but it is not a game and he senses in his heart that if the black one catches up to the red one it is all over --
that image too fades and he is transported again, this time back on earth. he thinks these are memories -- or maybe they are things that happened happening again -- but this time he recognizes the mountain in the distance. he is the air; a different red wolf so much like the first is walking through a field of burnt summer-grass. she freezes and he becomes aware of two other shapes, their bodies so intimate and so familiar to him that for a moment his heart is filled to burst with a profound sense of longing and loss --
mama! papa! he reaches for them but that image fades too, the way driftwood pulls away in rough water. he knows he will not see them again.
now he is over a field with small, dark shadows stippling it. as the smoky image clears he realizes these are not shadows but bodies -- thousands and thousands of bodies -- there is a burning stench to the air, the smell of rot and infection, and though he cannot see them, he hears screams and the clash of teeth. the field is endless; it spans on as far as he can look -- and as he peers closer he sees that there are small bands of coyotes moving through the endless rows of the dead. he thinks they could be survivors, but as they stop and kick over a corpse he gasps, for they are taking things from these bodies and killing the ones that still cling to life.
he is amazed by how tenuous the fallen's grasp on life is, how loosely their will seems to slip away from their bodies -- and he can see their spirits as they slip from mounds of flesh hacked to bits, some still twitching, their faces framed in death grimaces that he cannot escape. these spirits join the thousand-strong beads of light that rise into a sky so red it drowns with blood.
he has had enough of these visions but they keep coming -- he has finally recognized the rhythm and pace of each new apparition: it is a lifetime and yet, a single pump of blood through a visceral heart. he can feel this image trickling away too and he is all to eager to leave this field of red and black behind.
just as the landscape begins to change he sees a familiar shape move among the coyotes. her back is hunched and she is younger but it is distinctly her; her face is framed in blood and around her neck is a beaded strip of flesh holding offal and packs of moss. she jerks her head back and rowdy gasps, for her eyes flit to the space he occupies and the sage green of that brutal stare cuts right through him and says i know you are there.
but she is gone as quick as she had come and now he is on the back of some great giant. the ground is rolling out behind him and as he listens he knows he is not a wolf but a stag -- there upon the softly rolling back of a green hill ahead stands the lone figure of a black doe.
rowdy wakes with a gasp. his tongue is leaden and the sour taste of plant matter clings to the edge of his mouth. already, the dream is distant and the images are passing into his subconscious like riverwater through a sieve. his heart is pounding against his bony chest like war-drums, adrenaline is stinging the edge of his tongue and making him salivate -- but as he sits there the nightmare slips away and in steps qiao, his dinner held neatly between her pin-prick teeth.
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