In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming; PHASE II

[Trekk]

Although the sight of the dark god (their magician, their protector, their leader) is lost to his eyes, he can still feel the god’s presence brimming behind his forehead. The name of his lost lover echoes in the winged stallion’s mind like an insistent drum, as constant and thriving as a beating heart. Gail, Gail, Gail. Her, her, her. He knows what it is like – to feel each breath sucked in and pushed out to whisper her name, to hear the shattering of one’s own heart when they are not close, to taste the saltiness of her skin under his lips in his dreams – and it makes him even more determined to find her.

He breathes in the endlessly cold world of space, and then his next breath is taken within the ashy depression of catastrophe. Blinking against the harshness of another new world (another foreign place, another whirlwind of beginnings and endings, another sharp change of scenery, another brutal reality to adapt to), suicidal brown eyes gaze around. He can already tell he doesn’t like this new world (or the same world, but in a different time – he doesn’t know, yet); it is too close to those old memories. This new world, filled with ruin and disaster and morbid thoughts turned into realities, is something that suddenly twists his old depressed thoughts into something real – too real for him to bear.

He waits with a feverish impatience for the magician’s voice to direct him toward their next destination. It’s a shocking thing, he thinks, that the god whom horror stories are told about is suddenly someone he relies on and trusts to protect him and get him to the next stage. He could, for all any of them know, be leading them to a path which will only end in complete ruin and death for all his little rescuers.

By the sea, he says, and the chestnut tobiano sniffs the air hesitantly. It’s easy to pick out the scent of salt and water on a breeze suffocated with burning things and ash and chaos. The smell stings his nose – sharp against the dull crackle of fire – and the stallion finds himself easily turning toward the scent. After living on his own for so long, instincts are habits deeply rooted in the stallion’s being – especially when his instincts was the only thing that kept him alive for a good number of years.

Finding it easier to take to the skies rather than pick his way across the scorched, barren earth, the hopeless lover spreads his wings in flight. It is much easier to fly over the destroyed earth compared to clumsily waving them up in space, and the memory causes his eyes to turn toward the clouds in hopes of spotting a star or two. But there is nothing other than a seamless canvas of gray and it reminds the winged stallion of his true mission. Her, her, her.

It is while he’s in the sky that he feels the power of water. It’s much stronger than any raincloud or thunderstorm or even a body of water. The presence is immense and powerful and entirely its own being, although the scent of water doesn’t cease to overcome his sense of smell. Suddenly confused by the change in scent (his trail is roughly thrown off guard, instinctual GPS struggling to recalculate), the stallion twists his head and scans the horizon for any hazardous rainclouds.

Instead of clouds, however, he spots a levitating body of water. It is as if a large lake had forced itself away from the cocoon of its nest and instead floats in the air, held together by the atoms of air and space and emptiness. Curious (and now confused as to which way he should travel), the stallion flies closer to the water, brown eyes inspecting it with mingled hesitancy and surprise and curiosity.

Just as he gets close enough, the water moves. It doesn’t just shift slightly as if an imaginary tide had swept it away; it directly lunges at the flying stallion, droplets of liquid moving together in a motion so coordinated and realistically alive it catches him off guard (as much things are, recently). Letting out a rough-sounding growl of surprise, the chestnut tobiano tries not to get his wings wet – for certainly wet feathers equals a lack of flight and from this height the results could be disastrous – and instead the lunging water ends up soaking his chest and neck. Pawing roughly, he attempts to strike at the body of water with an angry snort. The water morphs (something both tantalizingly magical but equally as dangerous) into a replica of himself, only in the manipulated form of water.

If he must fight this thing, the stallion suddenly realizes, it would be better not to fall from soaked wings at this height. So he dives toward the ground, sensing the dive of the water-horse behind him. And when he lands, the shape-shifting water lands just behind him, about fifteen feet off. Pivoting with wings held tightly to his sides, the stallion lunges toward the water horse with poisonous fangs bared. And the fangs land on their mark, but when the injection is released, the dark-colored poison melts into the water and disappears into nothing.

Fear and panic begins to creep into his mind, but the ringing sound of ‘her, her, her’ in his mind encourages him to defeat the creature. So, tuning out the powerful smell of water nearby, the stallion searches for the faraway scent of salty ocean water. And when he finds it, he immediately moves into a pulsating gallop, muscles stretching and wings spread to encourage his fast speed. Already exhausted from the space trip, the gait isn’t nearly as quick as he would have liked, but the water-horse seems more intrigued to what the living version is doing rather than actually killing him (much like a lion might play with its mouse before the kill) and doesn’t overtake his speed.

The roar of the ocean reaches the stallion’s ears just before he nearly falls over from exhaustion and the familiar warmth like the warmth from space heats up his skin. Turning abruptly toward the water-horse (who now is manipulating into a tiger twenty feet tall), the winged stallion takes a step away, lulling the shape-shifting water closer to the wormhole. The heat, however, from the wormhole, begins to evaporate the water-tiger until it grows smaller and smaller and smaller.

And just as the chestnut tobiano is overcome with the ripping sensation of transporting through time and space and memory again, he sees the water-tiger go from something powerful and whimsical into something invisible and ordinary.

He smiles, because it reminds him of life.

trekk.
he fell apart with
his broken heart.