Meadow

Around him, the gilded, gauzy curtain of fog did not ruffle back to reveal a haunting figure, only whispered his own words hollowly back in a faded echo- but, though no vision of life was forthcoming, there was a reply; a bold, brass-beaten ring of a voice that sang back and sliced though the muffling mist like a shining, well-worn blade, comfortable and familiar in the grasp of the one who wielded it.

“I haven’t seen you—but I know you, nīðing.”

“Do you?” he hummed back, not disbelieving but delighted. His red ears strained, fluttering, a low flame hungry to set light but eager to burn slow and long to what it set its flickering tongue against. Where..?

“If you would speak, then come yourself—and know that neither words nor blows will sway me.”

He thought he could feel a direction- feel, more than hear, that bold blade sliding its flat along his cheek and down the side of his flexing throat, its keen edge singing against his side- and he twisted to it and followed as if tracing his fingers up its warm length to find what held it. Prowling along frost-silvered fringes of grass, he paused, examining what might’ve been a figure, still in the mists; collared by them, as he drew closer, shackled on three of their fine, strong legs with cold fog white, their dark face rimmed at eye and mouth with a muddled reddish-brown like old blood as it swam into view. Unabashed, still advancing, he arched toward them and sucked in a long, audible, whistling breath through a flaring nose. Real enough; alive enough. He could smell the grass turned warm by her body heat lingering as a mellow, faint sweetness on the borders of her lips. Alive enough. ‘Real’ was a subjective matter. He spoke through the billowing cloud of his exhale, and still he advanced, now with the agonizingly-slow, intent, considering step of a feline.

“You speak as if something does sway you,” he murmured in a humidly-sympathetic swathe of breath, and his dark eyes crinkled, “and as if it wounds you to be swayed.” His black feet stopped at the borders of her body, close enough that they had barely to reach to touch noses, though he didn’t. “No need to tell me,” he hummed, low and warm and luxurious, his voice melting and harmless. “You know me, after all, and to be known is something I have never feared-” his black mouth smiled, too placid to be pitying; too thoughtful to be kind- “but I understand if the same is not true of you.”