#proteinwrites

This world is filled with echoes.

  Walk across verdant fields and through night-shadowed valleys and you can feel the whispers of the dead beneath your feet as vespers from beyond the grave.

  I have been following echoes.

  I suppose you could say that echoes are all that I have left.

  There is a road that wends south through the mountains.  Clawing from toothy pinnacle to sharp jawed vale, it is slick with shale, arid, dreamless. I have followed it for days, alone with the scuttling of spiders and the screech of nesting raptors. Hours thinking, humming and composing to myself, pondering on old scars that have silvered out. This pilgrimage, alone, starved, dehydrated, it is nothing that I have not done before.  I have been wandering for many summers past but this is somehow different. It is as if this time I truly intended to die.

  I suppose that, because of this, my discovery of a village sequestered between the peaks was unwelcome. I had reached the point of shambling, dragging my battered body along the path, the tight braids of my hair spined by vegetation, the bright silk of my robes dulled and torn. For several minutes I had considered the shining white walls and vivid eruptions of flowers the flickering images of a final breath. I had slumped and waited in expectation of death.

  ‘Shalor.’ Hello. A voice asked, curious and small, a dormouse of a voice. ‘Shem shalor?’ Formal hello?

  ‘Taleam.’  Tired. I replied ‘Shellac, ya terma taleamra.’  Sorry, I am very tired.

  ‘Are you ill?’ She changed fluidly to the common tongue, well, a dialect of the common tongue that I had never before heard spoken. I raised my head slowly, the muscles of my shoulders aching with the effort, and met a pair of eyes, two suns drowned in the depths of an ocean trench.

  ‘No, simply tired.’ I responded, my tongue slug heavy in my mouth.

  She made a small noise of assent, her eyes moving methodically over my face. Her hair was braided and twisted up with slips of teal silk and heavy golden beads that gave an odd prismatic sheen to the dark tendrils, like the dance of oil droplets on the surface of water.  Warm dark skin flushed with freckles and lips the bloody crimson of rose petals in a small face with bones like a cat. She wore a hooded tunic of gentle turquoise edged by baubles of topaz caged in gold embroidery that looked like little spiders. Despite their delicacy they were dulled by rock dust, clothes for work not the slow leisure that I had first envisaged.