33rd of Fall, 515 AV
mid-morning
He ran. He ran fast.
The coyote was so thirsty his tongue was dry and his throat was like burrs. His belly was empty and burning. His nose and paws were ripped from exposure, from searching out the scent, from endless running and backtracking and running again. His bones felt like rocks grinding together. His muscles shook.
And still he ran. He ran fast. Too fast for his dogs to keep up, panting and whining behind, lost in the grey-whiteness of fallen clouds.
Because there was a city.
There were people.
---
The closer to the city, the longer he ran, the harder it was for him to breathe. His gasping closed up in his chest, his heart beating too fast and hard. However much it hurt, it didn't matter; his happiness was too much to mind the pain. The coyote was back where he was not alone. After days and days and the hopelessness of the empty wild. Though it was getting ever harder to breathe, he yearned to catch that breath, and chased it faster yet on the still, foggy wind.
He wanted to inhale the damp, horsey scent of the city. The people scent: the seams and folds of clothes and leather and something else he didn't quite know, the not-as-soapy-flower smell of braided hair and tanned skin (very different from the blue men), the cooking of rich food and smoke that tickled his tortured stomach.
---
It was a while before he actually saw the place; it was so foggy that he didn't see much until he was actually there. What he saw then was enough to confuse him. The coyote straggled from a sprint to a run to a limping trot, barely able to keep his feet as he looked around with large eyes and perked ears.
He expected strong stone walls that reached to the sky and streets that folded on top of each other, stairways and dizzying walkways and pretty carvings, flowering gardens, strange bright colors, and underneath it all the smell of the sea and many large blue bodies, a close, friendly, wary, sharp thing.
This was not that.
It was strange, pale above-ground burrows made of something he didn't know. The smell reminded him loosely of the market called bazaar in Riverfall, of the stalls called tents; strange stretched cloth-stuff that snapped in the wind and bounced the rain. But the bazaar there had been colorful; this place was more like dried, bleached bones in the sun, like the bent humps of a peculiar, many-backed creature twisted in on itself, around and around into a unidentifiable mass. Flat. It was so flat. And disperse. As he approached and the fog lifted back to the sky --mixed now with grey-black cooking smoke-- the strange city, if it was a city, unfolded. It stretched far to either side of him, curving.
It was alive, he saw, in a way Riverfall wasn't. Moving. Open. And basic.
Without thinking he had dragged himself to the edge of this odd people-place; his dogs, frightened, stayed outside and out of sight. The coyote's tail wagged slightly as he became aware of the sparse crowds of people just within. They were busy, flitting between the tents and each other. His tail wagged harder. He picked up speed again, limping back into a trot, and then a lopsided run. He wanted to see it all. He wanted to see every person, to look into their human faces and feel their warmth.
There was an exclamation, a sound of surprise, though what it said he didn't know. He heard it as a greeting to this new and different place. The coyote turned a corner, now among the tents, and nearly ran headfirst into a pair of slender legs. At the last moment he turned, wobbling, and this time something ran into him, something fast and biting that shot past his eye and nipped his ear, causing him to yelp. His head turned, looked at the end of a stick-thing, the bottom lined with feathers, the sharp-point stuck quivering in the dirt behind.
Too slow, his mind said danger. His paws moved on their own, jumping beneath him, and another arrow hit where his body had been. He wheeled, stumbling, and leapt away, darting behind and around, hearing human calls that he didn't understand. He ran, but his legs were weak now and he nearly fell. He ducked further into the city. He didn't know how far he went, or where. Finally he passed around one of the tent-things into a tight, secluded space, and stopped, spitting the small bundle from his jaws that had dried up his mouth. There he shifted in a flicker like light glinting off still water.
Where the bedraggled, half-starved, dehydrated coyote had sat now was a bedraggled, half-starved, dehydrated (naked) young man. He put a dirty, raw hand to his ear, and found that the top of it had gone, bitten off by the arrow. Warm blood dripped to his shoulder. He was too tired to think what to do.