Closed Pilgrimage, part II (Khida)

[Colt]

The rain continued to pour, and beyond that he could neither see nor hear anything to suggest that he had been heard by more than thin air. Did that mean… did that mean that he had been dreaming? Had the woman simply been some odd illusion, or was he just remembering something that had never happened?

He continued to stare into the dark of the storm, mind tying itself into knots trying to figure out his apparent hallucination. Such a strange thing to imagine, for sure; a naked woman, appearing in the middle of Cyphrus? He shook his head. He really should take care to get more sleep; the travel have been wearing on him. Perhaps they could stay in place for a day. It was an impossible occurrence, the woman.

Aside from the fact that she had appeared once again.

Another bolt of lightning flashed over the plains, and he saw the bare, curving figure on the approach with something clutched in her arms. He blinked, freshly stunned, as she loomed from the rain and held a parcel to him. With a detached bemusement he realized that it was his bag of carving tools.

“Here,” she said. “These should not be out.”

She had been real. She was real.

He took the leather bag and frowned. Through his clouds of confusion shone a much less complex, easier-to-handle feeling; a feeling of concern. Though he did not know who or what this woman was, nor did her existence make sense in the simple world of prey and predator and beastly company that he held so dear, he could not help the simple feeling of another. It was strange, and foreign in its own way; though he knew others of his people, he had never been the same as them; they were complicated and expected etiquette and pleases and if you don’t minds and so many pointless things and they never, ever stopped talking. The hopeless din and endless questions were what had prevented him from returning; the beasts, his family, they were easy to understand; they did what they wanted and nothing more—simple, logical, and still filled with warmth and the need for companionship. They made sense.

Up. Here. In. Stupid. Nothing before her words, nothing after her words. No politeness or expectation of anything but his actions. Simple. Necessary. Nothing more and nothing less. Her statement as she gave him his tools; there was nothing more she needed to say, and so there was nothing more she did.

He put the bag in a corner of the tent. In the wake of her simplicity, the whys and hows of her being suddenly seemed to become less important; the simple existence of such company, of such human company, became enough. If she was more than some wild shade, the questions could wait; now, she was still stuck outside.

He gestured widely so that she might see it through the dark, both for her attention and for her to come closer.

“Rain,” he choked. “Long. Much longer. Inside, dry, no rain. Come.”

oocApologies for the sudden color change--I've finally color-coded his speech so that it's easier to tell what language he's speaking in.

[Khida]

He took the bag, and seemed to hesitate a moment before tucking them away somewhere in the tent. Then he stuck his head back out the door, a sweep of light skin in the gloom seeming to beckon her closer. Come inside, he offered, and the Kelvic bobbed her head, not quite remembering that it was dark and the motion would likely pass unseen. She stepped nearer, that one pace which took the woman from just beyond arm's reach to well within it, as good an answer as the nod and rather more evident in the night. He moved aside so she could enter, and Khida ducked into the tent's sudden shelter, relieved to at last be out of the rainfall. Inside was as dark as could be, insulated from the occasional flickers of actinic light outside; but a moment's exploration with her feet established bedroll here, packs there. She found a spot where she could push some of the packs out of her way and kneel on the floor. There, Khida tried not to drip on the packs as she wrung out her hair -- thankfully much shorter than some she had seen among the Drykas -- and wiped the water from where it beaded on her skin, as best she could. She avoided the mud for now, leaving it to first dry. All the while, he hovered, or seemed to hover -- a silhouette slightly lighter than the rest of the tent's contents, a presence sensed all too clearly and impossible to quite disregard for all his familiarity. The tent was not a large space, its walls close around the two humans; the only reason they didn't constantly collide was that she'd tucked herself into a still, small space. Even the heat he gave off seemed a palpable thing, and Khida kept watch on him at the edge of her vision, more a reflection of her awareness than actual seeing. It was strange, seemed almost wrong, to sit here as human now that he was safely inside; she was so much more used to being falcon in this context. "You will sleep," she said after a while, not quite a question -- but not exactly not one either, falling into some limbo between. For all her lack of clothing and of evident modesty, the statement was devoid of any salacious invitation or suggestion; sleep, she said, and sleep she meant. Khida paused in her task and turned her gaze more fully towards him, in the clear expectation of a response.

[Colt]

He made room for her to enter, and the space was too small for him to avoid the clammy feel of her rain-chilled skin against his. He shivered slightly, closed the tent flap once both of them were safely within and placed himself in a discrete corner; the shuffling of the woman’s movements suggested exploration, and he did his best to keep out of her way.

She took up residence in the opposite corner, where the least items were located. There, she busied herself with something the hunter could not see—drying off, perhaps, as there seemed to be little else to do. He settled into a hunched kneel, not quite willing to sit bare-bottomed upon the earth, and waited.

Her presence seemed to fill the tent with heat, a heat that he did not quite understand. There was no light to see by, but even the rain seemed to fall silent under the intense acuity with which he felt her presence, as if the rest of the world outside of the tent had ceased to exist. The whisper of her twisting hair and the dull patter of water on dirt seemed as loud as the thunder—louder, even, if he concentrated. And when that fell still, the silence became all the more deafening.

It was a silence of many parts, this burning quiet that filled the canvas shelter. The first silence was a calm one; it was not quite an easy silence, but neither was it an uneasy one—it was the silence of nothing to say, and it was the silence that all other humans seemed to fear and drive away with their endless talk of nothing at all. It was in this silence that he felt a strange connection to the woman, and was grateful of her acceptance of it. The second was a fierce, volatile silence that seemed not to exactly fill the tent, but to instead gather and cloud around him, settling on his skin, down his throat, in his stomach; this one was a tangled clash of too many things for him to recognize and sort out. There was the sheer being of another human in such close quarters, setting off alarm after alarm in his head, in his body, in his heart. But there was also a powerful, terrifying feeling of familiarity that soothed those alarms in the same instant they rang, leaving him teetering on the edge of an emotional knife that boiled his blood with sudden bursts of adrenaline and half-coiling muscles.

But the third, perhaps, was the most alien of all. It was connected to its predecessor, entwined with it, and it was the echoing, vast silence of the unknown. It was the deep, gut-wrenching feeling that there was something, something important that was not there. It was like an empty riverbed, or the empty sockets of a skull’s eye; hollow with the need for what once was there, and starved in its absence.

He remained there, form almost trembling with an undefined need for something he did not know, something magnified beyond recognition by both the stress of the journey that was drawing him eastward and by the agonizing exhaustion crushing him from all sides. His head was swimming with a single, unrecognizable question that flickered just out of his mind’s reach, trapping him in this dizzy whirlwind of things that were not known, and he was too far from his mental abilities to right himself. And so he knelt, silent in his roaring blanket of silences. He waited. And he listened to the rain.

“You will sleep.” A sudden, unexpected statement jolted him out of an odd pseudo-doze. He peered at the she-shade through the gloom, doing his best to organize her words as his grip on common began to loosen. Sleep, she had suggested—well, more stated, really—and that he could understand.

The hunter grunted in agreement, brushing dirt from his knees as he rose from his haunches. He made his way to the bedroll’s head, aware of the sudden condensing of the subtle, mutual heat that had filled the space, and tugged at the blanket with tired fingers. Had he not already been thinking about her, the woman might have slipped his mind in favor of landing upon the bed, but his thoughts remained fixed. He hadn’t left her in the rain, and he wouldn’t leave her to a dirt corner. He unfolded the entire overcover of the bedroll, pulling it to one side so that both the cover and the sleeping pad itself could fit. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but there was now enough space for two people to sleep on relatively protected ground if they squished. The fact that they were both stark naked didn’t even occur to him as something worth noting; her suggestion had awoken within him an irresistible pull to unconsciousness, and so he did not yet lay down—if he did, he would not get up again.

“Here,” he said, patting the new not-quite-bed. “You, for.”

[Khida]

Her words broke him out of his stillness, the hunter making a wordless noise of assent. Then he set about busying himself with something which wasn't lying down to sleep. It took Khida some moments of squinting into the dark to arrive at a conclusion for what he was about. Rearranging something, as cloth rustled and shifted; something which took up a fair amount of space, as he unfolded the thing and laid it out. Khida tried to minimize herself to stay out of his way, but of course that was impossible in the small space. He patted the newly arranged pad and directed her towards it. Khida bobbed her head in agreement, crawling forward to stretch out on the blanket. She lay on her side, with the shift in position feeling drowsiness rise abruptly from wherever it had been lurking. Her eyes drooped closed, but she did not yet sleep, listening to the quiet, rhythmic murmur of his breathing in the dark, the susurrus of rain drumming on the tent roof above. Dry, warm, sheltered from the chill earth and chillier water; it was good. The Kelvic waited until she thought the pattern of his breathing indicated true sleep, then, content, let herself slip over the edge into sleep and dream as well.

[Praetorian]

Your Diligence Has Been Rewarded! Sahar Wilderness Survival 2 Observation 1 Smell of Smoke Warns Away the Beasts Muddled Lines Between Dreams and Reality Khida: Appearing As If From a Dream Khida Observation 2 Tools should not be left in the rain. Sahar: Stupid Human Sahar: Sleeps Like Stone Notes : Good thread, guys! Message me if you have any comments or Concerns!