you are miles away but i still feel you
All things considered, it’s a happy day on the island. The sun is warm and bright on his shoulders, easing away the ache from the encounter with the siren and drying his red skin. There are only a few clouds in the baby blue sky, but they are not angry clouds. They’re unblemished ivory, wispy on their underbellies and bundled together on their backs like the curls on a colt’s mane. Songs of wildlife echo from beside his right shoulder — creatures of the air and creatures of the wood taking part in the pleasure of the nice day as well — and Hestoni finds the tiniest of smiles briefly dancing across his face. The symphony of animal noises reminds him of the Jungle, even if Island Resort’s wildlife are vastly different from the Amazon’s.
The easiness of the day brings a softness into the russet’s chest that he hasn’t felt since he had last spent a night nestled with his lover (before she had turned her lips toward the slick, whispering face of lust and made love with the rusty, fire-angry body of betrayal). It encourages him to move along the beach with long strides, covering a decent amount of distance while thoroughly searching among the tangled clusters of slippery seaweed and the tide-washed faces of hardy rock formations. The pale sand is still damp under his feet and Hestoni hopes that means there are shells nestled among the places where shells get stuck, unwilling to retreat into the unknown of the ocean.
He doesn’t have much time to search; by the time he is truly absorbed into the routine of looking for the precious shells, a great roar and a rumble beneath his feet force the titan to pause in his great steps and seek out the source. A great plume of sand looms in the distance, swallowing the sight of the structures and the other shell-seekers. The billowing granules are angry and mighty, growing from a snake in the sky into the broad shoulders of a dragon. For a moment, Hestoni admires both the shape of the storm and the rightness of his decision. The storm begins to loom closer, eating up the distance between the strange structures and the innocents scattered along the beach, and it shatters Hestoni’s peaceful enjoyment of the sight.
The russet stallion turns back toward his searching, turning his pace from a stretching walk into a long canter. The length of his legs had given him some distance from the others, but Hestoni knows that if he moves too quickly the beach will become a blur under his legs and he will miss any delicate pieces of decoration. His chest pounds with the ache of a quick heart, but there is calmness in his mind. That’s unsurprising for the titan anyway; he has served Carnage and worried over the labor and delivery of all his children and yet the shadow of a looming sandstorm does little to shadow those panic-filled memories.
His first discovery is only about an inch in size, sunbathing against the side of a rock only a few inches larger. The nucleus scallop is patterned in stripes of cream, yellow, and deep orange — a tiny tiger of the beach — and its back has small, smooth ridges across it. The stallion nearly laughs aloud (and how silly to think that he is enjoying himself among the fear that dances on the other’s shoulders; he truly thinks he has nothing to lose, having already lost his wife to the dances of evil) at how petite the shell is… Would his eye have caught it if he had been moving quicker?
Slowing to a manageable jog, Hestoni presses the dainty shell beneath the hold of his tongue. He doesn’t dare risk swallowing the tiger-striped fighter and the weight of it in his mouth is a comfort. The russet casts a glance over his shoulder while picking up his pace again. The storm is looming closer, sweeping the antlered mare into its darkness and seeming to pick up speed as the empty beach provides it the distance it needs to do so. Hestoni races toward the clear waters this time, hoping to find a smooth shell as the waves roar in and whisper out.
He doesn’t find just one shell; he finds more than he can count. A particular rocky outcropping provides the perfect hiding place for a mass accumulation of the very gold he has been looking for. They are shaded in the protection of the rocks and their colors look dim against the backdrop of bright, happy shades of the beach. Yet Hestoni knows the chosen shell is among the gathered and he nudges his nose against their weight, searching for the right one.
He isn’t sure exactly how he knows, but he does. The milk conch is about four inches in size, pale in color, and smooth with a pointed end atop its head. It feels like ice in his mouth compared to the warmth of the beach, but Hestoni doesn’t even dare to let go of it. His brown eyes drop to search for another in the treasure box of shells, but the sandstorm hits him so passionately that he stumbles away.
The fierceness of the sand clouds his field of vision and plagues his nostrils and Hestoni instantly knows he will not find the rocky outcropping again. There is no right or wrong, up or down, left or right among the force of the storm. It is only there that he begins to panic; his feet churn in the sand as he runs blindly, lost in the swirling oblivion of endless stinging flecks of grain. He wonders how he’ll ever be able to find a final shell when he cannot even find the refreshing coolness of the ocean.
So he picks a direction and runs there, hoping to encounter either the shade of the forest or the clarity of the sea. Perhaps he can wait out the danger of the sandstorm, nestled among wave or shadow until its anger wanes and it dives below the ivory shoreline. It doesn’t take long before Hestoni hears the fearful cries of the island’s wildlife and he realizes he’s been running inward. It does take him a moment, however, to realize that a shape is looming out of the darkness and that he will run into it in only a moment.
The shape of the palm tree’s trunk will leave an impression on both his chest and his head (a deep bruise will blossom, aching with every respiration until it fades) but at the moment the wind is swept from his lungs and he is startled by the tree among the sand. It’s a lone palm tree, standing apart from its brothers just past the true treeline. Hestoni tips his head back to look at its branches, where the faint shape of a bird’s nest quavers among the anger of the storm. Something falls from the nest just as he is looking up, seemingly fed up with the wind and torment that has been brought upon it.
It is a flamingo tongue, a little under an inch in size with a pale underbelly and a bright yellow-orange back. Hestoni stares at it for a moment, even with sand filling his lungs and burrowing among the slices and scrapes upon his skin. A vicious cough shakes him away from his stupor, triggered by the irritants of the storm infiltrating his throat. As the titan is snatching the shell off the beachfront and turning to stretch into a long gallop toward the beach, he hears a bird’s cry of grief shout from the nest.
A prized possession lost from one becomes a prized possession gained by another.
The bathing feeling of the water across his body is perhaps one of the most desirable things in life. Hestoni finds himself dipping his face in the water to clear his nostrils and his face. A trail of dirt sloughs off him and into the clear sea, but the titan does not look back. The shells are clutched against the crevices of his mouth — the two tiny ones beneath the weight of his tongue and the largest held in the pocket of his left cheek — and he doesn’t dare drop them throughout the journey to the Mountain.
The trip feels like it happens in the blink of an eye. One moment he is climbing up Tephra’s sulfuric beach, free of sand but heavy with exhaustion, and the next he is arriving at the Mountain’s summit. Fatigue lines each tissue of his body as the stallion finally drops his precious cargo near the other scattered shells. It hadn’t occurred to him that Beqanna was looking for only three shells, yet they had several more than that. The beginning of a frown pulls at his eyebrows, but Hestoni pushes the expression away. His brown eyes search for the fairy who sent them on their quest, wondering if she would explain away the issue of the shells.
hestoni