Karmina -- All the King's Horses
(One of my fav protagonist songs; Allie from Run Cold &Tay both share this song)
For almost twenty minutes the earth shook in the wake of some terrible battle. Roars and reverberations must've sent smaller animals into hiding, for my staggering run was met with near silence from all but wind and earth.
Luck more than any sense of survival put miles between myself and the monster's lair, and it was luck more than survival which saw me unharmed as inky twilight spilled over the land. In the musty burrow of some creature that had dug beneath the roots of a sprawling willow, I had caught my breath, my wits, and a small lizard I'd been planning on eating for dinner until I realized I couldn't start a fire. I wasn't often hungry in this land, but somehow after everything I felt ravenous. I looked down at the lizard I'd pounced on (not without a tiny nip to my thumb). It'd gotten its feathery wings tangled in a spider web. It'd settled down in my grasp for the most part, its limbs pushing every so often against my forearm as I carefully sat back on my knees.
Lizards here were a bit slower to run than those back home- from what I'd seen, primary locomotion occurred through flight. Sure they could climb and scuttle away, but they'd just as soon make a wild leap and a flap and be ten feet overhead. This one had tried to fly, and when its wings failed to spring open, its dark eye seemed about as surprised as I was to find my fingers closing fast around its soft feathers and belly.
"You are one lucky whatever you are," I said, twisting my head around to get a better look at its snout. They were beautiful in the way of sparrows and pigeons if you really stopped to look; tiny, prevalent marvels across all terrains of this hell as I understood it. This one, dusty with soil, had piebald scales of mossy greens with understated feathers of chocolate and cream. Carefully I transitioned the animal into one hand and used the other pluck the webbing off its wings. It hissed, hissed and snapped when I'd set it free on the ground, then without one lick of thanks crawled up a root and sprang into the night.
I waited several seconds, than crawled out, not in search of it, but water and to an equal extent: mud. A willow this size had to have a source somewhere close. I didn't feel particularly thirsty and yet after the show I'd put on with the frost that old part of me that guzzled water until I puked after basketball practice was saying that I needed to replace what I'd lost. Magic didn't work that way, at least not in my head.
Then again, magic didn't exist back home.
Not back home, I told myself. Back when I was alive. The worms wouldn't be at Tay Wilson yet, but they were coming. Blind, segmented, wriggling nasties feeling out the edge of the coffin...
Try as I might to turn off horrid imagination, I saw myself as I lay bleeding out in the snow, saw a casket, saw maggots wriggle under the thin film of my eyelids, flies crawl from the dark, now-bloodless hole Chiro's blade had punched through my gut. And above the peaceful facade of grassy earth an antlered corpse of a different kind, of the only father I'd known, was dancing.
I managed to hold in my demonic guts and get out to the source of the willow's size: a rush of water that may have been a river source. Immune to the temperature, I drank my fill in the darkness, and then, water running down my chest, moved into the depths and cleaned my body. I was going to slather mud on to keep away insects and add camo, but it felt so good to clean myself. Water wasn't enough to wash the filth from my soul, but it was a start, a short lived start, mind you, considering the mud smelled more than a fair bit sulfuric.
I was smoothing mud against the crook of my neck, enjoying a sudden dissipation of small biting insects, when an orange glow, small as a penny, bobbed through the forest along the direction I'd come. Maybe ten feet off the ground, it moved at a reasonably quick pace just a bit faster than a human could walk.
Something in my stomach flipped over. My tired bones knew it wasn't the King, but it was someone, headed almost unwaveringly toward the graceful sway of willow boughs. I considered just turning, just walking away into the night without looking back, but a part of me hoped it was rescue, and another part of me wanted to know what, if anything, I needed to watch my back for.
Making sure to memorize the short path from willow to water, I crouched within the shadows of a nearby tree and watched the light grow. Five minutes passed before the thing was less a light and more a figure with a light. It was tall and thin, built up from clay and bone into a false-human shape. My eyes followed the light down to rusty bone and glistening tendon, and then back up to a tall, cast-iron gas lamp.
And back to the body...And to the lamp, and again the body, as if I couldn't quite process-
Pulling my attention off the head, I ducked back as light stretched across the base of the willow. One of its hands was holding a thick chain, but I hadn't been able to see what paced at the other end.
When the light passed on, I peered around.
The longer I looked, the more I came to realize that the lamp was screwed into scapula and sternum. It was quite literally a Headlamp, unseeing and yet somehow I felt there was sight within the flame.
There was a sudden crack! of splintered wood. I jumped, turned my gaze in time to glimpse the thick tail of a crag cat bouncing off the roots as the animal shoved its head inside what I'd been planning to use as tonight's home.
The Headlamp crackled almost impatiently, slapped the chain against the cat's hide, which the animal seemed impervious too. It continued to sniff, great whuffling noises, and I slunk back a little deeper into the shadows. I didn't know many crag cats, but that one, damn, that little patch of dappled grey spots spelled WoW on his forehead, just like I remembered.
My stomach rumbled. I looked down as though it'd betrayed me. At once Shail's head lifted, eyes flashing with coppery luminescence. His ears curved, lips twitched, shoulders tensed in time to a gravelly chuff. The Headlamp blazed bright.
"Shail" or a slightly shorter word dropped from my mouth. I wasn't sure; I was off toward the water.
The cat lurched after me, got caught at the end of his chain by inhuman strength, and scraped across the ground until the Headlamp released him. Like a rocket he was off, bounding across the ground as I took a running leap from the bank, missed the water by a good three feet, and wobbled for balance. The cat banged into me from behind with the gentlest of headbutts, and I tumbled face-first into the water.
"Shail!" I gasped, coughing water as I struggled to stand. He started after for me again.
But the Headlamp had reached us, walked straight into the water, its lower limbs eroding in the current. It reached toward me, clawed fingers extended, when the cat, still dragging his chains, whirled on it with a shriek and smashed his tail into the blank face. The lantern exploded. Flame seared upward in a brilliant blaze as I fell away, singed from my wrists to my chin. The light roared toward the sky, a beacon of some kind. I kicked it in the ass and the thing toppled the rest of the way into the water. There was a hiss, then darkness. Smoke curled over the thing as I clambered out of the water, hugging myself, rubbing frost over the burn.
Water rushed around the cat's feet as he sniffed at the pile of dissolving mud, sinew, and iron. He pawed at it a moment longer, sat with his ears rounded forward, watching for movement, and finally gave up. His attention flicked back to me with a curious step, and all at once I started shouting.
"Shail, NO," I said, flinging mud and small stones at him. I could barely drag my hand through the mud, it was freezing so fast.
Mud slid down his shoulder. A pebble pinged off his hide. He started chuffing, stretching out his head in search of a good pet.
"You can't!" I said, scrambling up the far bank as fast as I dared. Under the haze of moonlight my footsteps frosted over. "You can't come near me. You can't, Shail. Please. Please listen. Just this one time, please."
I scrambled back against the rock, but there was no where to go. He kept coming, jogging with a chirruping purr. I hugged myself hard and turned away. The last thing I saw was his massive head just feet from my body, the last thing I felt was an arc of cold panic stretching from me to him.
Then the thick wedge of his head thrust beneath my arm and against my hand.
"No," I whispered, flinching away. "No, no, no...."
It was only when the purring got so loud my arm shook, that I realized there wasn't ice, only water mixed with salt and the profound relief that I was not alone.
A second penny-sized light flicked on in the distance, and then another, and another.
"C'mon," I said, wiping my face on the back of my hand. I picked up his chain, wrapped it carefully in my hands and climbed on top of the cat, giving him pets and every kind word I knew.
It took me a day to figure out how to break the collar off his neck, but we were in good shape after I'd sawed through the thick leather with a sharp enough rock. Shail hunted and we would eat together and hide together and at night I would crush up a plant Chiro had told me was good for a crag cat's stony hide and tell him all my woes as I rubbed the mint-scented oils into his joints. We carried on this way, two half-feral things staying alive in the forest, until late one afternoon when we're stumbled across a road and the pulled over cart of a peddler. This one had its load born by not one but two giant sloth-bear creatures.
I got off Shail, and the pair of us padded around to the far side of the cart. There was only so much embarrassment I had left being naked in front of a total stranger, and today I was in no mood to play the coy vixen. An old man looked up at our approach, smiled with all six of his teeth, and pointed his walking stick at the my stomach.
"I need clothes," I said, cutting him off before he made the obvious comment.
"I can see that," he said, and gestured toward the assortment of bobbles, charms, and trinkets visible at the edge of his cart. Wind chimes jangled merrily off the back corner. "Take whatever pleases, Your Grace."
"Thank you," I said, and with Shail as close to within reach as I could have him, grabbed the nearest clothes I could find from the shaded interior. It was nothing spectacular and I looked like I'd been tossed in a drier, but I did find a nondescript grey robe to throw over the pants and linen shirt which made things a little ...better wasn't the right word. I didn't at all trust that these clothes weren't teeming with magic, but until I had something else it was truly better than nothing.
The man was cooking something that smelled of roast garlic and chicken, and it had both Shail's interest and that of his own pets, but I refused to eat anything and wouldn't let my cat, either. Every time I looked away Shail would creep an inch closer, but I was on to him.
"What are you doing so far from your husband?" the man asked as I joined him on a rock in a position where I could view the road.
Itching the scars on my hand, I regarded the peddler for a long moment, and answered, "Looking for him."