When the world had changed, Rannoch had been young enough to change with it. The loss of day had been startling, but he’d only known it a short while and most days were already filled with things that were new and different. To a wide-eyed boy with his mother to keep him safe, evernight had just been one more new thing.
This world felt strange to him, like he couldn’t quite find his footing in a place where morning woke him from deep slumbers, where chittering beasts did not hunt those who could not defend themselves. He didn’t need to be so migrant to find food either, and for once his belly was always full. All the trees that had withered and the leaves that had fallen away and turned to dust crushed underfoot now blossomed with more shades of green than he could have ever imagined existed.
He is both ancient, carved by the dark and by horror and by the loss of a mother who had disappeared into the night when he was too young to be alone, and brand new. New beneath a sun who travelled the same path across the sky every day. New beneath stars that he was only just realizing held secret shapes and patterns and so many names to learn. New to the birds that had returned to the trees, to the wildlife that now travelled the same forest paths as him.
New, especially, to his own reflection.
He is even larger than he remembers his mother having been, and the tusks that curve from the corners of his dark mouth are as bright as bone. There is so much hair it might’ve made him laugh as he realized, looking around, that most had less. But that too is a reminder of his lost mother, of his own peculiarity and the way it tends to be so isolating. He has found no one like him. There is thick fur all along his body, dense and warm, though it seems heaviest along the crest of his neck and down the front of his chest, heavy too at the bottoms of his feathered legs. Frost clings like a kind of tangible winter, cobwebbed into the longest tufts of his fur. It is most obvious against the darker brown and tawny, nearly invisible in the places where he is white.
But his favorite part of his reflection is none of that at all. It is the shade of his quiet eyes, a blue so clear they might be glacial, might be glass. Might be two pieces of the healed day sky trapped inside the ring of his irises. The frost giant smiles, forgetting that when he dips his head lower to study that shade of blue, his tusks will shatter the reflection into a hundred trembling shards of uncertainty. When it does he blinks, frowns, and then turns away from the water with an old ache in his chest that he’s forgotten to forget. It rises up in him unwelcome, poking at ancient wounds inside a chest made hollow with neglect.
Night will be better, it always is.
This world felt strange to him, like he couldn’t quite find his footing in a place where morning woke him from deep slumbers, where chittering beasts did not hunt those who could not defend themselves. He didn’t need to be so migrant to find food either, and for once his belly was always full. All the trees that had withered and the leaves that had fallen away and turned to dust crushed underfoot now blossomed with more shades of green than he could have ever imagined existed.
He is both ancient, carved by the dark and by horror and by the loss of a mother who had disappeared into the night when he was too young to be alone, and brand new. New beneath a sun who travelled the same path across the sky every day. New beneath stars that he was only just realizing held secret shapes and patterns and so many names to learn. New to the birds that had returned to the trees, to the wildlife that now travelled the same forest paths as him.
New, especially, to his own reflection.
He is even larger than he remembers his mother having been, and the tusks that curve from the corners of his dark mouth are as bright as bone. There is so much hair it might’ve made him laugh as he realized, looking around, that most had less. But that too is a reminder of his lost mother, of his own peculiarity and the way it tends to be so isolating. He has found no one like him. There is thick fur all along his body, dense and warm, though it seems heaviest along the crest of his neck and down the front of his chest, heavy too at the bottoms of his feathered legs. Frost clings like a kind of tangible winter, cobwebbed into the longest tufts of his fur. It is most obvious against the darker brown and tawny, nearly invisible in the places where he is white.
But his favorite part of his reflection is none of that at all. It is the shade of his quiet eyes, a blue so clear they might be glacial, might be glass. Might be two pieces of the healed day sky trapped inside the ring of his irises. The frost giant smiles, forgetting that when he dips his head lower to study that shade of blue, his tusks will shatter the reflection into a hundred trembling shards of uncertainty. When it does he blinks, frowns, and then turns away from the water with an old ache in his chest that he’s forgotten to forget. It rises up in him unwelcome, poking at ancient wounds inside a chest made hollow with neglect.
Night will be better, it always is.
RANNOCH
equus mammuthus
son of furious and extinct
no chaos stuff, please <3