Andarin: The Mountains: tracking treasure down; fehazathant

"Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god."
- Sir Francis Bacon
Her blood thins in the moon’s pale light, some errant Northern wind has cast a chill upon her that causes her to shiver and stamp a hoof in the grass as she feels the stillness of him breaking open and aside to cast the sleep-heavy but graceful shape of him against her. His hip and his shoulder both seem to fit against hers, as if made so, as if two halves of stone (or shell) have been fit back together to form a whole, and all that she can think of (can see, in moonlight and dream) is of circles coming full circle, coming whole, coming home. For a moment, the marriage of their flesh in question, in curiosity, in touch, seemed more than a marriage of convenience but a marriage of moment, of history, of something rich and deep unfolding, flowering and full and when they came apart, he was not the only one to miss it - to long for the simple press of flesh to flesh.

She wanted to succumb, wildly and madly, to the impulses that surged and sang in her blood. If his pulse leapt and pounded in him, it did the same in her in the absence of their skins touching. Her fur raised, bristled, stood on end from the absence of his own, as if charged and electric with want and this, ah this, confused her because she had never wanted more than in that moment. But something bid her to close her eyes and tread air as if it were water, as if she could slip beneath the still surface of the night and disappear - perhaps into the sudden longing that rose undeterred in her as something alighted upon her jaw. At first, she mistook it for the gentle quiver of moth’s wing and foot until its weight seemed too full, too grave, to be that of a moth and she realized that it was no moth but a mouth - his, and it rests - owns - the breadth of her jaw in its shape and slant as though her face had become territory - his, for the claiming.

There is in her an impulse to run. Flee! Flee! Screams the blood as it battles against the insurgence of passion and something else too, something that to her, has no name but expresses itself in the lean of tree to wind and the touch of muzzle to muzzle, be it horse’s muzzle or bear’s or hare’s. Then she stays, and wonders what wild compulsion roots her to this patch of earth so that as she shifts from foot to foot - fidgeting, no doubt - their sides brush, shoulder to shoulder, in vague whisperings of fur. It is perhaps his name that roots her there, or the expectation that her own must follow his, a dark-winged shadow that lifts from the base of her throat, where the pulse presses at the flesh in a gentle stammering of surprise, and sound then follows in the form of her name flung softly - almost carelessly - from her lips as though the name holds no sway over her but she feels it, deep in her self the shaping of that name, the old, old power that it draws from and the mischief that couples with the wisdom in her blood.

“Michabou,” she murmurs, and the earth croons underfoot from the thousand throats of insects that hum and hum until the wind hushes them. And then she wonders, what next? What more could she say that does not elude the snare of her throat and the trap of her teeth that breaks the legs of syllables in two? Mostly, in the moonlight, in the sly glances she steals of him, how it is that he walked in her blood and left tracks there, heated and strange. In her thoughts of tracks, of tracking, she forgets the animals that move in the night - in the forest at their flanks, as their tails whisk from leg to leg and tangle together then separate - strange lovers, those tails of theirs, that met and mate and part - and it seems to her that the night had a sudden stillness to it, a strangeness that stems from the absence of sound from all but the humming of blood in her ears.