Storm Watch Butte gunslinger I

been a long damn time since he'd been this far south. his cut-out had been straightaway. colt was tired of waiting and for looking out all the fuckin' time. if they wanted to find him, they'd locate his piss splashed every few miles between the hinterlands and the edge of the flatter terrain.
for now, briggs was a free agent. and it had been a long time since he'd been that either. reverting immediately to scavenging and rat-eating, he fled when sand stung his eyes and found himself clambering into the ledges of a butte.
"weeHEW"! colt whooped, lifting a paw against the whirling sand that seemed to fill gaze, mouth, fur, teeth, and anything else exposed. he clung to the side of the stone as the dry storm raged in a path passing his foothold.

If he did not feel like a prince, it was simply because he was one no longer.

He wished he had followed Europa when she had left, sensing something was wrong before everyone else did. Then he wouldn't have had to face humiliation at the borders of Florentia - then somehow things would have turned out better.

For a short while he indulged himself in the fantasy of being a stateless and fearless explorer, the Magellan of his generation. But with every mile traveled he became more and more disgusted with himself, with the so-called royal blood in his veins. At least Magellan had a kingdom to come back to.

Inwardly, he shuddered at the speed at which Myros had collapsed, less an empire than a fever dream, and laughed into the wind. Granules of sand collected between his teeth.

The sound of a stranger's howl instantly transmuted all the self-loathing inside of him into giddy vertigo: this was what freedom truly was! His lineage - generations of toil and bloodshed, ingenuity and creation - meant nothing here, and what a fantastic revelation. In that moment he loved the red-eyed man for his deed of alchemy.

He howled as loud as his lungs could allow, and braced himself against the screaming sirókos.

the roar of the lashing sand parted just enough for colt to hear another voice, one burning in a thrum hot enough to singe through the harsh clouds of falling grains. 
another man was out there, another man with the same vehemence mounted to the heavens. colt braved a look around from the ledge and downward, searching for any spot of fur or figure.
"might as well come up if yer down below!" he hollered, readjusting his grip to the stone as the storm flared once more, lashing at briggs; he shut his crimson eyes just in time.

Red-eyes spouted gibberish into the air. His voice had all the loveliness of broken glass, or was that the sand in his throat? 

Lynx let loose a peal of laughter which nearly saw him tumble down the side of the caprock. There was not much down there to cushion him, other than hard sand that had been compacted by the passage of many creatures before.

Den ékho idéa ti sto diáolo eípes, he shouted, scrabbling for a secure pawhold, Allá s'agapo, aderfé!

Then, with a face brightened by an a-ha moment, and an accent as thick as tar, I love you!

they might as well have both been clinging to the proverbial tower of babel, for all briggs could make of the rolling and completely foreign syllables that sailed through the winding sand to strike his folded ears.
two explorers with a language barrier, great. 
love? love??
colt was intrigued beyond himself; paw over paw he let himself down the side of the butte, reaching blindly through the shoals of sand roaming their atmosphere for fur, an arm, anything; and when the man felt he had grasped a solidness, he dragged forward, inching backward upon a ledge with the barest overhang over it, a smallest shelter in the teeth of a beige funnel-cloud.

Hauled up to the lip of rock like a half-drowned sailor, tears streamed from his eyes as he blinked away sand.

I am Lynx! he offered between heavy breaths, his smile bridging one ear to the other. 

Now what? His smile lost a few teeth.

Not for the first time, the princekin sorely regretted never paying attention in the language classes that Ixion had forced him to sit in on. Speak a man's native tongue and you will reach his heart... blah blah blah... He had preferred to spend his time cooing after pretty girls and boys. 

It did not matter anyway. There were no words in any language to describe the feeling that brimmed inside him now, pulsing with such strength as if it were a second heart.

He felt like St. Paul just before he became St. Paul, struck from his horse by a bolt of light terrible and beautiful. 

He swallowed; his throat constricted around grains of sand. He coughed. You?

The storm wailed outside their excuse for a shelter, more wrathful than elegiac.

lynx was a pretty boy, a tall boy, sand pouring from his withers into puddling rivulets that touched the cowboy's own paw. "well, lynx, yew got a helluva way o'greetin' a man," briggs scoffed in an amused, roughened laugh. 
the younger wolf coughed. "get all that out, yeah. a bad business, havin' a bellyfull'o sand," colt drawled, and he lay more relaxedly upon the ledge now. "the name's briggs." nothing else needed for now. "yew from aroun' these parts, friend?"

A mulch of phonemes went in one ear and out the other. Lynx could barely delinate the boundaries between his words, softened like toffee by the accent. There was no chance he could catch his name.

Pio argá, pio argá, he insisted, flapping a paw. Friend, here? No.

Words swarmed at his mouth. He felt if he didn't let them out, he would explode. Not a bloodless affair either - guts plastering the walls, the sunburnt face of his savior.

Den eímai kanénas. Den to vlépeis? Eímai-

He groped for the right word, ruff bristling, a mad genius or a mad fool, as if there was a difference. 

-eímai eléftheros! In the confined space, his voice sounded all around him, a physical force.

Finally he calmed enough to mirror the man's lax position. But the lashing of his tail betrayed him. Lynx wore his heart on his sleeve although it was not a heart that warranted much admiration.

Now I am with you, Foineus.

there it was again. colt swallowed the words he was about to swap as the younger man began to speak in those near decorative words, which were unlike anything for which the uncultured cowboy could hope to have a frame of reference.
his gumline ached for a good strip or two of birch to be folded against it for the long chaw. he spat over the side of the butte, a bad and nasty habit, trying to gather the smattering of common spoken by his new friend.
"yeah. now yer with me." and he hoped it wouldn't be a bad idea after all. "fiynuss?" he attempted back?
fineness? the ragged mouth twisted in earnest humour. he slapped his chest, sending sand in outward trajectories. "colt. colt briggs. and yew is?"

Red-eyes, "Foineus", Colt - parroted him the best he could, though his funhouse pronunciation saw an impish smile cross Lynx's face.

Lynceus, he offered again, a paw over his chest. Lynx, é Lynceus.

Lynceus, son of Thyestes. No worth in the patronymic now. Foreign currency with better use as firewood. He wondered where his siblings were. How they had introduced themselves. After he and they died, would there be any more reason to speak Thyestes' name into air?

He licked his lips, eking out a yawn.

Where next, Colt?

His sober black eyes watched the man's face intently in the half-light.

the abandoned locomotive of colt's desert experience creaked rustily to life as he glanced after the sandstorm. it danced aside and away in abstraction, spinning to absence with a final wailing cry that howled above their stone shelter.
"well," colt begun when it had passed, "reckon we oughter find water first an' a meal second." lynx. lycen — well, he wouldn't even try it. lynx was well enough. lynx'n colt, a fittin' team for now. he wondered if the kid had folks around here, what with the odd speech and all.
he stood and stretched and searched for a hold, then another, which would feed them down to the ground and into the butte's shadow, to reconvene before they set out.
together?

Wah-dur, he mimicked. He should know this word. Something to do with food, maybe. Was there a lower rung on the hierarchy of needs?

Colt was careful. Lynx, less so. He left the foothold that the cowboy had so graciously found for him. Beneath an outstretched paw, the sandstone began to crumble.

His flailing paws missed purchase by a hair. He tumbled down the butte with all the grace of a barrel going down Niagara... landing flat on his back on the hard, gritty scree.

Winded, he found just enough air to breathe:

Arhídeea.

Warped through watery eyes, Colt was a massive desert tarantula, complete with ornery mandibles and bristling hairs.

Lynx smiled weakly to communicate that he was not dead, nor seriously injured.

the height of irony, to go from caretaker to pack leader to mentor — again. colt descended in a proper fashion and shambled toward the downed boy and his moistened eyes. "got the wind plumb knocked outta yew, huh, youngblood?" briggs mocked in a crow, only when it was apparent the other was not truly harmed saved for a bruised ego.
but he extended his rawboned arm next, hoping to pull the kid up. "no more'o that till we find water," colt ordered firmly, then cut his eyes out from under the butte, taking the wet fragrance lingering in the atmosphere.
there was water here, stale, warm streams choked with new sand. he snorted in disgust and turned away. "might be cleaner lakes," due south, in a locale called bismuth, though colt could not know that. he glanced upward at the hot sky. it was mercurial for even a short walk, but briggs didn't want to chance another of those gritty geysers.
when lynx was ready, he set off at a ground-eating trot.

Fading here, maybe I can start us a new thread in Bismuth Lake? Thank you for the thread <3

The pain was so stark that he could taste metal, and for a moment the shining outlines of the world became untethered from their forms to hover ghost-like, as if the rocks around them had each acquired souls and halos of their own.

But Lynx was young, and pliable yet. So what could have been a terrible fall was only an inconvenience enough to punctuate a day of two of dull aches.

He got to his feet, uncertain at first, but quickly caught up to Colt.

He would make it a game to place his paws exactly where the cowboy had left his prints in the sand so that it looked like only one wolf had made passage.

No matter, for the wind quickly covered their trail.