are the dead really silent?
My eyes look up from the ground at the wolf who stepped forward. Had I been standing I would have towered over this younger creature. Instead I lower the rest of my body to the ground, relaxing my pose, and giving him the advantage of movement and position. There was little he could do if he desired to hurt me, even less desire within me to hurt him. I watch him pleasantly as he investigates me, seeing me far more clearly than he sees everything else around him. Many here seem to have come into the practice of focusing only on the physical, ignoring that which they can not see, touch, taste, or hear. It is a curse when one of those dimensions are stolen from the innocent, a punishment when taken from the guilty, a release when offered by a giver.
His voice sounds in my ears, which perk at his name. No longer a stranger, I smile and bow my head in respect to the creature of the living. “Samhain.” I answer, the ancient word with the traditional inflection, ‘sah-win’ hardly pronounceable by the best of beasts, and so I rarely share it. He had asked me who I was, the answer he sought was soundlessly given. My pose and my posture, grounded and steady. I am the master of nothing, keeper of no one, loyal to only the air around me. Actions suggest I am harmless enough, my size remains a considerable warning to the contrary, my manner balanced the two as delicately as the scales of judgement in a game where every moment was another play played by unknowing players. Everything I do answers the long of his question while my word sums up the short. To truly define who I am to Alistair would be to know the future and divulge the past. To see myself and my place from the sights of all that was around me. Who I am to him was different from who I was to the beast whose life I claimed with my teeth, which is different from who I became when I put my paws in the water of the crags. As I gazed at him I sat comfortably with my claim to my name. It was up to him to define it.
Slowly and carefully I returned to my paws, keeping my movements fluid and light. I circled him once, inhaling his scent. The forest had settled strongly on him, but not the one I had come to frequent. A memory of another I had met flickered, though the scent of trees had been buried by dirt on the other wolf’s pelt. My head tilted in curiosity at what kinds of souls had come to gather in this mysterious forest, the pack that seemed to have come to form there. What about it seemed to drive its inhabitants back into the arms of the earth outside its borders?
Facing the wolf again, I know my curiosity is plain on my face. “Why here?”
lord; 4 falls; 41in/190lbs; fatelessXheartless; wandering ghost |