Meadowlark Prairie My body is a sacred note.

Sleep-walking through life; pulled by the tension between the stars, which stared emptily down at him, orbiting his vision like a trajectory of comets circle a singular sun. They get no closer, no farther, but they are not stationary either - Heksvarrim sees the pinholes as blurred lines, dancing.

He realizes it isn't his eye that is the problem, or any clouds. The heat in the air has banished any cloud-cover. It is the forest — reaching with open palms for those same stars.

Pluck out those eyes, he thought. For a moment he saw those trees as three giant heads, the tines of their branches were many teeth, and they grinned; sisters three.

The forest did not beckon him close. He did not recognize it, but he should have. There was a strong odor, woven like a tendril of spider's silk, that reminded him of a deep, dark, wet hole in the ground; the smell of death.

He would not go investigate something as prolific, nor as mundane, as that. Without a word the corpse walked on in his stilted way, keeping to the edge of the forest.

not to double up but I had to

Bridget took walks daily but she wasn't used to seeing ghosts.

That had to be what this was. She was stock still, stunned, for a solid few moments before she could even work up a voice. It wasn't that she was happy to see him, or even really emotional - just shocked. When he'd disappeared from the island she'd assumed he'd either moved on completely or gone off somewhere to finish his life alone. Those markings were unmistakeable.

Shit. He was disappearing from her view. Hey! HEY! Oh, fuck, hold on. Bridget picked up her pace to try to close the distance between them. He wasn't moving all that fast, but she couldn't tell from where she was if that was going to change. The last thing she remembered, actually, was him freaking the fuck out over something. What was he doing here?

An uproar began. It kept him stationary - not the surprise that might've flared within his heart, not the desire to run or the instinct to fawn before the solar flare; but something altogether different. He turned his good eye towards the stranger just as they disappeared from view. His hip began to throb, and this drew more of the corpse-man's attention once he knew he was alone.

He'd barely turned to inspect the intricacies of the healed lacerations there, along his lower back and his legs, when another explosion of sound drew him sleepily forward-facing again. His empty socket met Bridget first, then the glowing sphere of iris with its pinpoint pupil.

She was a streak of light. An ember, fallen from the sky. In his mind she burned all that she touched to ruin: but it wasn't soot that trailed in her wake, only shadow. Not that he could tell the two substances apart. Black, oozing.

A slow, cat-like blink finally interrupted his stare.

She caught up but stopped abruptly before she drew too near. He looked far better than when he had been with the Druids - he was up and moving, at least. But his stare was completely empty.

She'd never seen anything like it. It wasn't just that he didn't recognize her, it was the lack of really any kind of response. Her pelt prickled uneasily with the sense that something was wrong.

You don't recognize me. She said it as a fact and without any disappointment. It wasn't a surprise. He hadn't recognized her before, when he'd woken, and he'd been delirious with fever. She'd be a shit medic to fault him for that.

She waited for something to change and bring some spark of something. If she wasn't mistaken, then whatever was wrong with him was entirely beyond her.