cornyx HZD au snippet
Jan. 7th, 2019 08:37 pmIt is incredibly hard attempting to remember to use DW after so many years away! This is something from earlier last year that got posted to tumblr; I think about it quite a bit, thought it's been pushed way down the to-do list.
Cor can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he's seen a Nora in the wild, often little more than flickers of lighter color at the edge of the treeline, figures just a little too large to be animal in the tall grasses. As a boy, out at Hunter's Gathering, he'd spoken to one of them as they'd huddled near one another in the fragile warmth of a blazing campfire to wait out a terrible snowstorm — at least he'd tried to, though he'd quickly learned his curiosity was no match for the hulking warrior's reticence.
Once, Cor had imagined all Nora in just this way.
The Nora curled around himself on the red rocks, here in the early morning shadow of the Daytower isn't particularly hulking. A man — maybe Cor's age, maybe a little younger, somewhere beneath the purple swell of bruises and scrapes marring what Cor can see of his face. A crust of blood tracking from nose and mouth, pooled and dried on the sandstone. More skin stripped from along the length of a bare arm, its fingers spread, reaching out towards nothing at all. A quiver half-full of arrows, fletched with blue-tipped feathers and bound with some sort of sinew strapped to the Nora's back, but no bow.
A short distance away, the campfire has long burned out.
Dead as the man on the ground, Cor thinks morbidly, and wonders why it is a Nora might seek out this miserable death so far from his sacred lands.
( trace your bloodlines to the sand )
Cor can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he's seen a Nora in the wild, often little more than flickers of lighter color at the edge of the treeline, figures just a little too large to be animal in the tall grasses. As a boy, out at Hunter's Gathering, he'd spoken to one of them as they'd huddled near one another in the fragile warmth of a blazing campfire to wait out a terrible snowstorm — at least he'd tried to, though he'd quickly learned his curiosity was no match for the hulking warrior's reticence.
Once, Cor had imagined all Nora in just this way.
The Nora curled around himself on the red rocks, here in the early morning shadow of the Daytower isn't particularly hulking. A man — maybe Cor's age, maybe a little younger, somewhere beneath the purple swell of bruises and scrapes marring what Cor can see of his face. A crust of blood tracking from nose and mouth, pooled and dried on the sandstone. More skin stripped from along the length of a bare arm, its fingers spread, reaching out towards nothing at all. A quiver half-full of arrows, fletched with blue-tipped feathers and bound with some sort of sinew strapped to the Nora's back, but no bow.
A short distance away, the campfire has long burned out.
Dead as the man on the ground, Cor thinks morbidly, and wonders why it is a Nora might seek out this miserable death so far from his sacred lands.
( trace your bloodlines to the sand )