Felltree Marsh sunflower silence

merrick left the berrywood and crossed up to a marshland, filled with treacherous shadows and reeking puddles of mud. the rain, which had never ceased, only formed a mist today, and it was through this that he began to roam. ursus lay behind him, home of his spirit, his beloved, his children, but there was a horrid restlessness in merrick that could not be quelled.
and so he went off in quiet, hunting shades at the edge of his own vision.

owlglass set the duck in the ground and eased dirt over it. there was no need to rush. moisture clung to him like a second skin and he looked at the world through a fogged-up viewfinder, remembering that an artist had once told him that there are really no hard edges in the world as we see it, son and that he'd never quite understood it until now. he kicked water over his boots, left foot then right foot then left foot again. he missed his ocean--

miss murphy i'm so sorry for yer loss, he- yes he was a good lad he really was- no, no it was all an accident, a terrible accident, 'm so sorry miss murphy--

his eyes snapped open like a deer's. he sat up and looked around. where am i? have i been sleeping this whole time? did he whisper that, or only think that?

far to the east, deep in the fens, someone was pacing away and stepping on the coattails of his brain. another stranger, not too noticeable. he watched him, dark-haired and slender, fading in and out of sight, and wondered, where to? where are you going? the familiar surge of excitement in his chest, anticipation, something coiled tight and shivering with potential energy, ready to make the jump...

distracted, he placed a hand over his meal, still buried in the one plot of dirt that hadn't been reduced to mud.

hullo there.

merrick was not alone, as he soon found. there was a ghost behind the friendly voice that filtered toward him, and the coywolf paused in his aimless, pointed search.
blood here, seeping from the body of a duck somewhere below the earth. merrick knew the iron tang when it hung in the air. by now, there was rarely blood the boy had not been stained with.
his single eye began to glint with the light that suggested merrick's attention had been captured. with him in the rain a spectral figure wearing a black cap fitted over his wildling hair, and a pair of dark seawater eyes. "hello," merrick vibrated in return, a shark who cut closer to test the edge of the channel between them.

the stranger said hello back and owlglass was content to sit there, his fingers tapping out an old heartbeat, ruminating like so many other people in the bowels of a train, an airplane, a subway's rattling insides, looking intensely at nothing.

cloudy trusswork is pierced by daylight, mullioned windowpanes cast a sickly glow through the fog. they were in a smoking lounge. the air was blue with it. he emptied his mind, took his sweet time. what happened to your eye? 

aerasha and her bear-- that sounded like an old greek myth. the two people he'd met so far had parts of them missing, filled up with scars by blue-collar working-class cells. his stomach jolted as he entertained a shivering thought: what if, with every new person he'd met, more and more of them was missing? what if the next person he met was missing a tongue? and the next, a leg, and so on, until,

until nothing was there at all? 

he bit back a smile. inside his brain there was a shambling wolf, more scar tissue than actual flesh, hairless from the eyebrows down, eyeless toothless tongueless earless. then he lets go of this fantasy.

revui had gone, and this man was nothing like him. but still merrick yearned for that imposing presence. he did not find it in this odd man with the charcoal headscarf. he blinked, single eye disappearing into the void of his face. the injury could be framed as a necessity of the war merrick fought each day. the truth might be better received.
he wet his lips.
"a kid. biggest L i've ever taken." a grin. it was the truth, after all; the serpentine-eyed thing golem might have yeeted that child over a mountain and murdered his father
on a technicality
but he had branded merrick forever first, a loud beacon that pulsed and narrowed and proclaimed him other.