In Too Deep
Rowan + Lucian
07-30-2022, 04:31 PM
How long had it been since he’d seen a familiar face? Surely he deserved this ruin, Rowan knew that he did. His father had warned him of it all his life and he believed every word the man said, believed it in a way that was more physical than mental. And yet, here he was. The year and change he’d spent away from his father’s band had not been kind to him, his once-soft pelt robbed of its plushness, his handsome features turned sharp and gaunt by a hard winter on his own. He was almost unrecognizable now, even to himself. That felt right. He’d left most or probably all of what he was behind when he’d betrayed his father. He was as good as dead, a corpse still shambling around. Even still he still wanted like a living creature, still felt the need for food and rest, and every day he searched and searched, though what he was looking for tended to change from day to day. A lot of the time, it was a concept. Salvation. Hope. Once, it had been an individual, but Rowan wasn’t sure he even wanted to find him anymore. Now, as lurid greens stained the blue of the sky and the horizon line gathered clouds that were not so much gray as they were black, looming and ominous as the very specter of death, Rowan searched for nothing more than the shelter to see him through to morning. He didn’t need to be an expert in weather phenomena to recognize a storm, and a bad one at that. There was hardly the time to even think to move inland before the storm was rushing up to meet him, first the wind, and then the rain. Into the woods he ran, flooding already stealing away the sand banks he’d stood upon mere minutes before. There was no time to be picky. The trees were packed root to root but they offered little coverage up until the flood line. That was a blessing and a curse, at least it gave him some ability to judge how high the flooding might come, and plan accordingly. From there he just had to find a hollowed stump or tangle of fallen trees and branches, and he could build up from there. It wasn’t like there was a shortage of wood. The wind only intensified, roaring and pulling at his fur. He’d managed to find exactly what he was looking for, a sheltered overhang where one tree had fallen and tangled in the branches of its neighbor, and had just begun shoring up the gaps with mud, sticks, and bark when he spotted what looked at first glance to be a corpse. It was a heap of sodden white fur pressed against the trunk of a tree as if glued to it by the rain. As he uselessly shook the water from his fur for the thousandth time, wondering if he should do something. And then it moved. “Hey idiot!” he called out, vocal chords cracking to be heard above the wind. “It’s flooding! Come with me to higher ground, I’m building shelter!” |
Word Count: 524
524/2500
Current time: 11-09-2024, 02:00 PM
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