The soil was dust in Eren’s hands. He rubbed it between his fingers, watching it fall like ash through the cracks in his skin. Dry, cracked, lifeless. Just like last year. And the year before that.
The fields of Harthvale hadn’t yielded a true harvest in nearly three summers. Not since the rains stopped coming at the right times, not since the bees began to vanish, not since the last village elder passed into the earth without leaving behind a successor who remembered the old prayers.
The sun hung low in the sky, red and sullen. Eren wiped the sweat from his brow with the edge of his sleeve and pressed his boot harder into the plow. The wooden handle groaned beneath his grip as he urged the blade forward, cutting another shallow furrow in the cracked earth. His ox, Bramble, snorted and tossed his head, his ribs showing too clearly through his dull hide.
"Easy, boy," Eren murmured. “Just one more row.”
Bramble didn’t respond, but he moved.
No one else in the village was bothering with their fields anymore. They said there was no point. Better to beg the tithing wagons or go south and enlist, where the king promised food in exchange for a blade. But Eren couldn’t leave. Not the land. Not this place. It was foolish, maybe. Prideful, maybe. But this soil was the only thing that had ever made sense to him.
Even when it didn’t love him back.
A breeze stirred the yellowing grasses. It carried the scent of dry rot, distant woodsmoke, and something older, something strange. Eren paused, hand resting lightly on the worn plow handle. He closed his eyes. For a moment, he could almost imagine the soil humming, whispering beneath his boots like it had when he was a boy.
But the moment passed, and the wind stilled.
Later, at the tavern, they laughed at him.
"Still out talking to your dirt, Eren?" jeered Gerren, the butcher’s son, his voice thick with drink. "The gods aren’t listening. Maybe they never were."
Eren sat quietly by the fire, hands wrapped around a chipped mug of thin ale. He didn’t answer. He rarely did. What was the point? They didn’t understand that the gods weren’t something you summoned with big words and coin. They were something you worked beside. Something you bled for.
Something you remembered.
"You'd be better off joining the king’s march," another voice added. "At least they feed you, even if you die screaming."
"I’m not much good with a sword," Eren said softly.
Gerren snorted. "You’re not much good with a plow, either."
Eren left before the fire burned low, before the last few desperate souls slipped into the arms of sleep or each other. Bramble waited patiently outside, blinking in the moonlight. Eren pressed his forehead to the ox’s warm hide.
“You don’t think I’m crazy, do you?” he whispered. Bramble snorted, as if in answer.
The walk home was quiet. The village behind him was a smear of orange light against the deep blue of the night. Ahead lay only fields and the groves beyond, twisted and shadowed, where even the bravest didn’t walk after sunset.
But Eren wasn’t afraid of the dark.
He was afraid of forgetting. Afraid that, if he stopped walking the same worn paths, if he stopped turning the same old soil, the land would forget him too.
At the edge of his field, he paused. The moon hung low over the horizon, silver and swollen. Something stirred in the furrows ahead. Something large.
Bramble halted, ears flicking forward.
Eren squinted into the half-light. A shape was moving through the field, lumbering, slow, too massive to be man or deer. His heart pounded, but he took a cautious step forward.
A bull. Enormous. Black as ink, except where its flanks shimmered with streaks of molten gold. Its horns were curved like scythes, and its eyes… its eyes were red, glowing faintly, like coals banked beneath ash.
The bull turned its head and met Eren’s gaze. And something ancient echoed in the back of his mind, not quite a voice, but a presence, deep and thunderous.
Eren stumbled backward, breath catching in his throat. The bull didn’t move. It only stood there, trembling, bleeding into the dry earth. And even though it should have terrified him, it didn’t. It felt like seeing something you’d always believed in, but never expected to find.
Slowly, heart hammering, Eren stepped forward.
“I don’t know what you are,” he whispered. “But I think… you were waiting for me.”
The bull closed its eyes.
And the wind stirred the fields again, gentle and warm, for the first time in a very long while.
First chapter from The Bull and The Plow, an erotic novel written by my larp NPC, Lord Selane of Farawke, and the art I did of a scene later in the book.
Realized I didn't colour Eren's nipple and I still can't do background well.
