The Horn: I
Their skimmers slid on a cushion of air, over rolling sands. Brown, square, squat shapes appeared in the distance: a village with flags fluttering weakly across an open, unattended gate. Desiccated body parts littered the sand-strewn stone pathway leading past the gate into a deserted market.
“The elder is said to remain here,” his companion said as she slid off her own skimmer. Only her dark, wide-set eyes showed over a tightly wound headscarf. “Feed the beasts. I go alone.”
He wiped down the skimmers and wetted their rubbery skin while she disappeared into the village’s tallest tower. Hours passed, though that was no new thing. Zevra’s negotiations with elders and the dead were delicate at best. He’d learned to not question it over the long years of their travel together.
And so her scream was a shock, as was the sight of her sprinting out of the tower with a wrapped bundle held under one arm. She looked strangely lopsided, with red slicking her beige robes and plastering them to the armor beneath. He sucked in a gasp as he realized her other arm was gone, torn raggedly away, with a sash tied around the truncated limb to keep her from a quick death.
He rushed forward to meet her and caught her just as her knees buckled and her eyes rolled back. He threw her over one shoulder, grabbed the parcel, and ran back to the agitated, keening skimmers. Ahead, the tower rumbled and shook on its foundations. Stones tumbled, slowly at first, then in a clattering rush.
“Ai! Ride!” He slapped his skimmer’s left fin and the beast leapt forward with its mate close behind. Zevra was a dead weight over his lap. The parcel under his arm throbbed with a strange power all its own. He felt no curiosity, not when Zevra’s lifeblood marked the sands and the tower behind them crumbled into dust. An enraged, disembodied bellow rippled outward from the deserted village. Sand spun around them, stinging and furious, but the skimmers were too quick, and he was too good a driver to let them panic.
Zevra groaned. He set a hand on her back and said, “Hold on, sister. Hold on. There’s more life in you yet.”
Jovan sat upright, gasping. Sweat slicked his skin, and he looked around his small chamber wildly as if expecting to see the sands and the tower just beyond his reach. “Fuck me blue,” he muttered. Beside him, Alissa slept on. He set a hand on her soft shoulder and let the warmth of her skin calm his panicked breathing.
Cat’s present, the heavy Elonian horn, decorated his desk. Gods, no wonder he was having odd dreams, what with Cat brought back to his mind. Moonlight shone in through the window and lent the horn a silvery opalescence. Fuck me blue, he thought again before slipping out of bed to grab his pipe and a pouch of tobacco. Might as well sit in the garden. He wouldn’t sleep any more this night.
( @alissabryliss-fairfax )
