anyone;

[Pollock]

He smells them like a feral thing. 

Like a water monster in a vast, briny ocean; like a maltreated hound, slavering from his jowls.

Smells them for the skin and horsehair, animated by a billion electric charges under their bones, that make them them.

Strangers.

(She may not be a temptress, but he is a fanatic – a junkie – for the small, soft places he knows she has. Knows because he has known many like her.

His nose crinkles, pulling for scent.)

Smells, too, the strangeness that makes them not from here (his kingdom come – their firmament of dust and dead magic) but from parting mists elsewhere. “Yes, my name is Pollock.” He replies, gravel and smoke, and nothing more. But he takes that name (that power, too) and finds it somewhere safe to play.

Pangea is too empty. They are found, by feral things like vultures. He turns his eyes from her to the chestnut stallion. He smells like the crags of the hinterlands – stale and dirty. A stranger still, come to the shepherd, at long last. Pollock cannot see the devil in the red pelt, but he would have appreciated the glisten of organs beneath it.

(Pity.)

The other man is silent and still – Nayl’s man, it would seem. And then, a familiar voice. Harmonia, still a queer and unknown entity, like a knot he hadn’t figured out how to loose (like a weapon he yearned to fire), with a babe at her hip. He eyes, with no gentleness, the small girl at her side. “Congratulations,” a sardonic drone, as he lingers for a moment longer on the delicate filly.

Lingers, and wonders, and then nothing more. He looks away.

“Yes, welcome to Pangea. Magnificent, isn’t she?” He smiles his crooked, crocodile smile. He turns, then, to Rodrik, head tilting (jarred by the lopsided weight of his great headgear), “Rodrik, right? I hope you were not hiding from us out here,” he motions to Harmonia, his dull eyes containing a trace amount of some perverted cordiality, “welcome to the fold. Now, Nayl of Nerine, did you have anything specific you wanted to talk about? Or, perhaps, you can tell us more about your home, hm?”

So like a feral thing smelling after a prey animal.