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You awaken in a thicket of things that are not quite trees but seem as though they might be related to trees. Flowers in strange, unsettling shapes blossom, and although the clamor of insects and bird is immense, you do not see any of them. You are beset with a strange sense of urgency and wanderlust. You may stumble across a strange, smooth-sided tower that glows from within with a light like the sun. It is surrounded by strange symbols half-overgrown with the alien vines, but touching it hurts--unless you are a Legendary, in which case it triggers an aching moment of insight that is gone as soon as it arrives. You feel as though you have learned a great and vital secret--but it is gone.
He awakens, and the first word out of his mouth is a curse.
"s**t," says Longstride, looking around from where he lies, limbs tangled, in a thicket that has grown higher than his head. At first he is reminded -- forcibly -- of his ascension, of waking up on a sandbar with kelp in his hair and sand in his eyes, but that was ... different.
Now he is in a thicket that rustles and creaks in the wind, and all around him overhead, stretching high enough that they cut the visible sky into pieces, are things that look like trees but aren't. They are too twisted, too strange, for him to think about for long -- not to mention that the flowers that bloom are unsettling and stir something low in his stomach. His skin seems to want to shudder and crawl right off of his backbone. It is not a feeling that Longstride, he of immense ego-fueled bravery, is used to. He considers the merits of laying in the thicket for some time, until he begins to grow cold, and then stands up.
The motion is more like a heave, a sudden bunching of muscle, and some of his blonde mane is left tangled amid the bracken when he finally lurches to his feet. He has grown stiff -- how long had he been lying there? Shaking himself like the canine he is (at least in part) cures some of it, but not all of it.
"s**t," he says again, and then takes a better look around, from a higher vantage point. The sense of urgency drives him to take a few steps out of the thicket, lifting his knees high: this is a familiar feeling, this wanderlust. It drives away the immediate anxiety of his situation. To anyone else it might be a force that compels them to wander -- to Longstride, this is home, and it calms him. It is like the first time one hears the tide coming in when approaching the beach after a circuit -- that sense of being almost home, that things are very nearly in order.
Some minutes later, when his feet have finished moving seemingly of their own accord -- and he has stayed in his kimeti shape for this, deeming it somehow necessary and appropriate -- he comes to the tower.
He paces a full circle around it, studying it, its symbols, the warp and weft of the vines that choke it. Somehow he knows this thing, though why he cannot say -- he just knows it in the way that animals know things, through instinct and plans long laid in ancestral times. This is a marker -- a marker for what? his unconscious asks, but he knows what it is and half-knows what it represents and some old animal instinct, one that lies very close to the surface, makes him touch it.
there is the birth of a foal, days old, stumbling blindly into the mouth of a caiman, and that is one of his brothers, and Longstride never knew any of his other siblings, and then there is growing up and running full-tilt among the kiokote, but that can't be right, because he lived in the swamp all of his life, and then the brief electric feeling of soaring on the wind, having flung himself off of an outcrop, before the bone shattering fall that almost broke two of his legs and nearly blinded him; there is the two or three weeks of constant pain and itching as the scar over his eye healed, the first flush of romance and the stirring in him when he met Waterside, the ache and then the terror of his ascension, his body rafting to shore on a sandbar, waterlogged and dead -- and then waking up and standing on the warm white beaches of tidewalker territory at night when the bright tide rolls in, the chatter and laughter of his sons and daughters
then the view pans back and it is every kimeti and it is every kiokote acha totoma zikwa and all of the halfbreeds, all of the others like him, all of the other kin and there is a something, something there, something he can almost hear, some distant voice on the wind--
And then he is spun back into his own body, into his own head; he takes a few staggering steps back away from the obelisk as if it has snapped at him. He has not felt this way -- scared, somehow, but also electric, alive, aware of every pulse, every twitch -- in a long time. Since waking up on that sandbar and dragging in the first deep gulp of rainwashed air, since he looked at Bitterleaf and saw them as equals for the first time.
"Holy--" he breathes, and then plants all four feet and shakes his head. It is a canine maneuver. "--that-- what was that?" Because it had been something, of course -- that momentary flash of insight, the lives and deaths of all kimeti, is now gone. There is only a muddled jumping of thoughts where that had been, the moments leading up to him touching it.
"Okay," he breathes; a moment later he mutters to himself, "not doing that again."
The heavy beating of gryphon wings echoes through the clearing a moment later.
