Let The Dreams Descend [open]

[kitsune !]

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

-- Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, Wallace Stevens

[/size]

There were spirits tangled in the weathervanes and broken boards, phantasmal human forms that billowed like silken scarves left out in the unsympathetic elements. If he turned his amber eyes to the sagging roofs of the village’s buildings – something he subconsciously avoided doing – he could pick out in the weak predawn grey more than two dozen silvery wisps, ephemeral and indistinct, wavering like scraps of fabric clinging to a splintered flagpole. Fewer breezed through the abandoned street; for some reason fragmented ghosts preferred to look skyward instead of at the sagging, dusty domiciles they had known in life. Vale would have regarded the spirits with scorn; they were too insubstantial, she would have argued, and not self-aware. They weren’t earthbound souls, only dry fragments of personalities that had once inhabited the ghost city. They were nothing like the brooding and all-too-self-aware poltergeists that roamed Aokigahara.

He shivered, acutely aware of the weight of the semi-dark and solitude around him, and then snorted, his humid breath another phantasm evaporating in the chilly spring air. What did he care about fragmented spirits? They had no bearing on the living, on the immediate. They were slivers of souls buried in the relentless gears of history.

The aleyabruj yawned, shaking his head slightly, and they mottled arachnid nestled by his ear muttered a faint protest. “Oh, hush,” he told her. She was the one who had woken him from a nap late yesterday afternoon, and she was the one who had suggested that they trade the rolling hills and gullies of Eaglewing Valley for the empty streets and strained forests of Sparrow Gallows. He’d visited the Sparrow Gallows before and hadn’t cared much for a land still bearing the scars of human civilization; he’d hoped that the softening influence of spring would make less evident the old wounds, but though winter was now in hibernation, he’d found no evidence that spring had gotten the message. While the snow drifts had, for the most part, been banished, he’d found not fresh growth poking through the soil but desiccated grass that crunched underfoot like a thin layer of ice.

“No matter.” He mused aloud (and the Essence named Anasazi whispered her agreement), turning his gaze outward to the corridor of human buildings around him. It was difficult to believe that these structures, weathered and antiquated, had survived a winter that had bowed so many stout trees. Apparently the humans had known something about construction, busy termites that they’d been, even if they hadn’t stayed to occupy their settlements.

He stopped in the middle of what had once been a dirt road but had been rendered unrecognizable by the steady encroachment of tired weeds, circled, and then slumped down with a dismissive huff, sending off a cloud of dust as he did so. He’d spent the last however many hours walking in the dark, his pads were sore, and he could sense dreams ready to spring at the edge of his consciousness. It might have been dawn, but clearly it was time for a nap.