Rattleskin Redoubt picea

something inside him had died.

it had died a rotten death and now lay fetid within his chest cavity.

germanicus felt its blackened seeping as much as he felt the sturdy absence of all emotion that day.

he strode out between the red pinnings of stone, voice a call for @Aquillius.

The response would rise in a series of quick barks, urging his father to come to him.

Germanicus would find the wayward boy pacing in a circle around a rock, eye locked onto a myriad of small holes in the ground. Aquillius looked up only enough to nod to the other man, before he would be focused on the holes again. 

Almost as soon as he passed, the flicker of a tongue stuck from one of the holes. The rattlesnake barely had a chance to leave its den before Aquillius wrenched it from the earth and flung it into the dirt. There, he pinned its head in place with a paw, apathetic to its hissing and attempts to get away.

… That gold mint eye turned its unwavering color to his father.

Father. He started neutrally.

his son was hunting snakes, a fit allegory for who he had become. who germanicus hd encouraged him to be.

the imperator fought the compellment which meant he should look in the direction they had left the woman.

"aquillius. we need a winter home if we are to stay."

germanicus could think of no medicine for what had befallen his son, he could think only that the single-eyed burn of that face toward him unnerved his spirit in a half-dozen ways.

The snake twisted beneath his paw. Aquillius turned his gaze listlessly to the twisting, horrid thing. Muscle, sinew, bone, wide eyes that stared back at him.

Yellow lifted again from the snake, now coiled desperately around his foreleg in some attempt to either climb him or get away. Germanicus spoke of needing somewhere to stay.

She knows of the canyon. The eye left again, back to the snake.

She may bring the creek down on our heads. She’s bewitched them, you know. As though he was speaking merely of the weather, even with the hissing thing beneath his foot.

there was a relief in germanicus to hear tactics from his son's addled mouth.

a pained daughter. a mad son. and where had cornelius gone? look what he had done. look how he had left them 

at any moment he knew he might become imperator again. he could take up the sword and shield and assume the role of soldier without thinking.

but he was not prepared to be a father.

"not the canyon then. and the valley as well. that leaves the hinterlands, the taiga, the coastline."

his eyes surveyed the land as he spoke, the flat desert and the round hot sun.

Germanicus surveyed the land, and Aquillius held down the snake. He was getting tired of holding down the snake. The thing had stopped its rattle, apparently accepting death. Disgust, with both himself and the damned snake, curdled behind the cage of his ribs, white hot and angry.

The coast has much traffic besides the shores beside the Hinterlands. Winds are bitter cold off the sea. A childish wrinkle of a snout.

And I don’t like the smell. He pressed down harder on the snake.

The taiga is the last place one would ford to, but may be the last place to find food in the dead of winter. Harder he pressed.

The Hinterlands has little traffic, and a lot of places to go. Perhaps there.

the snake strangled beneath a roman paw. 

germanicus finally set his eyes on it as the breath in the thing came less easily.

aquillius spoke as if nothing went on beneath his paw.

the hinterlands had been empty when he also lived there with the elk woman. it was sound advice or perhaps would have been from anyone else.

in his son's mouth, it was death rasping. 

"the tuktu then." now the imperator looked toward the serpent, then into the one eye of his crazed son.

each emperor's children had one in their generation. it had been his brother and germanicus had thought himself escaped.

but now it came for aquillius.

Finally, it seemed, he had enough of strangling the thing. In a quick, brutal motion, he held its head between his teeth. The twist of his snout killed it, but the rip of flesh separating from sinew and bone was visceral. Wrenching outwards, Aquillius severed the head of the snake, and tossed it across the way. It lay lolling in the sun, venom pooling beneath it as it thrashed in death throes, unknowing that its spirit was gone.

Aquillius shook blood and venom from between his toes, spat it from his mouth. There was no joy in killing a weak thing for sport. It had accepted death.

They always did.

Baleful eye watching the thrash of the head as the body lay limp beneath him, he turned to his father.

The Tuktu. He parroted in confirmation. He reached down to pluck the scaled body from the ground. No meat should go to waste. If it was inedible, he’d feed it to one of the birds that always seemed to be around.

When do we leave? He said around the snake.

the snake in his son's jaws slowly turned the eagle's stomach.

"if you wish to forge ahead, go now. if you desire to wait, then i must travel a last time to the valley and end my time in kvarsheim. alone."

he meant to avoid akavir and wren and gunnar, lay a stock of prey a last time for the stone circle pack and be gone.

He would go to end his time with the Circle wolves, and Aquillius felt a tinge of regret. They had been kind to him in a time where kindness went over his head, when he spiraled in delirium.

He sharply nodded.

I will leave as the sun sets. He began to trot past his father, before he stopped, as if overcome by a sudden urge. He twisted his head enough to move the blinded eye in what he thought was his father’s direction.

Be careful. A pause.

Please. Then, he picked up the pace again.

I will wait for all of you in the Hinterlands.

"walk safely, my son."

no matter what aquillius was now, let it be known that he was past, present, and futurely beloved.

when the young wolf had gone from sight, he felt tears pressing against the back of his eyes.

but the eagle did not let them fall.

he did not have the luxury of grief. he did not have the mercy of death. he must enter fatherhood now and belatedly.