Even in Autumn the river water was warm, deep, and somehow dark. Leaves spread across the brackish and muddy surface, their golden and yellow coloration spattered with brown and for a few moments in the glimmer of the sun they looked like fire.
Each hoof stirs the silt and soil of its bed, and the mud clouds it in such a way that peering into the depths gets you little more than shadows and foggy bits of an irritated bottom. The sounds from the land stretch across the vast reaches and the hoofbeats rattle the water in a way that almost sound of drums well below and throughout.
At first his steps are loud, and then silent, and then absent.
She finds this intriguing, and she listens again to hear them picking back up: to hear the closeness and drift, and the way he lingers near the edge. Bubbles float to the surface and ripple across it, a jet stream that has left her mouth.
Yidhra, however, remains well beneath the surface in the murky depths and wades herself closer and closer as she listens to these familiar and yet stranger, steps.
Peering up she can see his shadow on the water’s surface and she waits until he paces or walks closer, her body remaining and a single fleshy appendage reaches out from her shoulder. Elongated and blackened the barbed talons are retracted and the suckers pulled in on themselves: the Kraken’s tentacle lifting from the water and rising gently beyond the bank.
She reaches out, tentative at first, and the paddle-ended appendage finally makes its move… grasping or seeing to grasp his leg: to tug gently as he head lifts from the water.
Yidhra
@[vulgaris] here we go...