Candice drives Obi somewhere in her car.
He’d dreamt of this long enough-- to be somewhere the plants weren’t painted onto a backdrop, where foliage didn’t exist only for a purpose: hiding, distracting, camouflaging. Until now, greenery had been nothing more than visual relief against structures built for gunfire.
Here, in the South African jungle, was life.
Certain stretches of its barrenness recalled World’s Edge, yet here the land moved to its own rhythm. They passed farms, lakes, fields brushed with snow. It was mesmerizing-- the way everything glittered, the snow soft and pillowy, as if inviting him to sink his face into it. Cold wind seeped through the window as the car rattled on, its rickety wheels tracing the fingerprint of every rock.
Planets apart, as though from a world long left behind, and still it felt like home. A cliché, perhaps... but all the more real for it.
In that moment, he envied his tour guide (or should he say, an angel), slightly, yet was also drawn in-- as if her beauty were only a reflection of the land itself, shaped by it.
It was around then that Seer spotted the most magnificent thing.
Tall, gentle creatures with long craning necks, not unlike the cranes he’d once seen in the courtyards of World’s Edge. Their hides bore a mosaic, as if some patient hand had brushed them in fragments of ochre and clay. Prowlers struck without warning, but these moved slowly, unhurried, as if nothing in the world could trouble them.
“What is that?” he thought to ask his blonde companion, rapt with attention.
@cswnpl
