my shadow's shedding skin ...
It starts as only the slightest stir, a trick of the eye that makes a passing lizard skitter back the way it has just come. Then bits of shadow begin to leech up through the pale, sandstone soil, stinking faintly of sulfur. They seep across the earth from a wide radius, drawn towards its center. One joins another; there, another union. They begin to pool together, stacking on top of one another in a writhing sphere before reluctantly confining themselves to the boundaries of flesh and bone. He’s a tall, lanky thing, his black, unblemished hide stretched taut across a skeleton of ropy muscle. With muddy brown eyes set in angular, aquiline features, and ears that curl in toward one another just slightly, he is otherwise unremarkable. Somberly, he takes in his new surroundings.
Shifting his weight, he stretches out his neck and coughs several times, spewing mouthfuls of gravedirt, and takes a deep breath, filling his lungs with air for the first time in some days. The sun is already on its descent to the west, heat radiating up from the baked earth. There are some versions of the afterlife that are similar to Pangea, especially in the dead of summer. He’s been here before, when Ana and her shadows ruled over it. But she is long gone and he is not one to harbor regrets.
It does not bother him that he does not remember the last few days, nor where he’s been since Frostreaver tired of his sedate pace and rushed ahead to the Chamber. Rather than risk Set sending him off on another errand, had turned away at the border of the pine kingdom and sunken into the earth … and then there was nothing. Not one to dwell long on puzzles insolvable, he turns and starts southward, long legs covering ground quickly despite his slow pace.
Shifting his weight, he stretches out his neck and coughs several times, spewing mouthfuls of gravedirt, and takes a deep breath, filling his lungs with air for the first time in some days. The sun is already on its descent to the west, heat radiating up from the baked earth. There are some versions of the afterlife that are similar to Pangea, especially in the dead of summer. He’s been here before, when Ana and her shadows ruled over it. But she is long gone and he is not one to harbor regrets.
It does not bother him that he does not remember the last few days, nor where he’s been since Frostreaver tired of his sedate pace and rushed ahead to the Chamber. Rather than risk Set sending him off on another errand, had turned away at the border of the pine kingdom and sunken into the earth … and then there was nothing. Not one to dwell long on puzzles insolvable, he turns and starts southward, long legs covering ground quickly despite his slow pace.
