when everything you
touch turns to
gold
It was difficult for Pythus to believe that he had truly left the Highlands, for the nights here were just as frigidly cold, and the mountain peaks just as treacherous. He wasn’t accustomed to navigating such perilous terrain, and dried blood caked what were once tender, soft pads on his paws. Every joint in his body ached — no,
screamed at him to rest. But his pesky mind had other ideas. Memories of a simpler time refused to let him be taken by the blissful nothingness that was sleep.
He’d managed to find a shallow cave hollowed into the mountainside, which was where he’d opted to rest for the night. It was sheltered enough from the wind, though the cold still slithered past the ingress like a deadly serpent. It pained him to leave what little shelter he’d found and face the full brunt of the cold, but this claustrophobic space was driving him madder than his thoughts, and so he finally dragged what he imagined to be a war-torn body from his lair and set out along the cliffs again.
He made it five paces before his rump collapsed onto a relatively flat surface, and he half-groaned, half-sighed in a mixture of pain, fatigue, and despair that was as bitter as the icy wind that now wove itself into his fur. Pythus desperately wanted to groom it flat again, but his saliva would only draw more warmth from his bones. So he sat, agitated and shivering and… empty.
There was a chasm in his chest, one that split wider than that at which he stared helplessly down at, beneath this jagged peak. Something more than trinkets and a warm manor had been stolen from him that day that his family lost the winery. His life, his essence… it was gone.
Everything. That witch had taken
everything.
Slowly, that empty chasm began to fill with a white hot rage, bubbling up like a volcano becoming active. His throat tightened and his nails dug into the stone, though he didn’t whimper from the pain this time because he felt as if he physically couldn’t breathe.
He’d had enough. Pythus shook his flask from his shoulders, the action more fluid than it used to be with how light it had become, and he downed the last few swigs of his cherished Arezio wine.
But when the flask was empty, so was this chasm, and there wasn’t enough alcohol to chase his worries or the white hot anger away. He threw the delicately-embroidered water-skin down into the snow and growled with frustration, swiping the last of the spice from his lips and nearly biting his tongue in the process.
That chasm split wider, and regret now poured inside, creating a chemical sort of reaction with the anger that still bubbled from beneath. That flask had been a gift from Memphet. It was the last piece of her he still had, that wine the last piece of his heritage, and he’d just thrown it away. The man scrambled to dig it up from the snow, paws desperately attempting to wipe off the moisture that was rapidly seeping into the leather. Dried blood crumbled and peeled from his pads and smeared across it, and panic seized him.
And when he was shaking too much from the cold and the anxiety to repair it any more, he pressed it tightly to his chest and let himself sink further into the snowy bank, the cold now consuming his side.
Perhaps this emptiness he felt had more to do with loneliness than it did any lost possession, because in this moment, he wasn’t thinking about the warm rugs of his manor or the twinkling treasures he used to admire along his walls. He was thinking about his sister, and how much he longed for her to be pressed against his side instead of this bitterly cold snow bank.
@
Nyx
"speak"
