Ryan Claude
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There is only the Wyvern and the glade, and the name of God. The past is wrought of smoke, at best - though not for lack of memories. I’m almost certain I’ve my own name, but couldn’t tell you what it was. Likewise, I’m almost certain I wasn’t born here, but couldn’t describe my true home. I’ve often chased these names and these homes around my mind, but no sooner catch one than another beckons; I no sooner see the hearth-lights of a tranquil village, than the barrel-fires of a shantytown draw my sight away. What I can describe to you, however, are the things I recall with precision, of which the Wyvern’s approximate face is the very first. Consider this: where eyes or teeth or nostrils ought to have been, ephemeral smears of contrast vied for purchase, and yet I knew at once - by the occasional truce of its warring features, and the particular tilt of its head - that I was expected. The Wyvern stared through me and beyond me with an eerie, prescient indifference, until at length the average of its flickering eyes slowly shut, and most of it slept. Feeling a sudden sense of intrusion I cast my eyes about, but was quickly overwhelmed by the trees at the glade’s edge, which - more even than the Wyvern - seemed unwilling to resolve. All at once they were pines, and oaks, and kelp, and cacti, and beeches and birches, and they were lit by the phasing moon, and the wheeling sun, and the whipping aurora, and the air between them was thick with the crystals of winter, and the drifting jewels of autumn, and the whirling pollen of spring, and the lingering embers of a sated wildfire whose blackened empire flared yet with impossible heat. So I turned away to hide my sight in the beast’s heaving belly, but - being silver, gold, black, barnacled, iron-clad, jewel-encrusted, and just once, for an instant, wrought altogether of stars - it was no refuge, and I was forced to close my own eyes, and only when my ears could no longer distinguish between the wind in the leaves and the rain on the sand did I fall asleep.
By Ryan Claude3 years ago in Fiction
