Amid explanations, Murrukh spat. The cyclops leaned forward, that bulbous eye straining to peer
through the physician's keeper.
"Right koind of
'er t' do. But look'et ye, like yer some special lump'a shit what doon't stink, eh? Itchin' foor a fight, ain'tcha? Y'ain't no
hooman, little boy; y'aint no down-tempered creamskin."
The bald head turned as Mercy dashed off into the brush. He heard the boything's summons through the brush. Having no dexterity of his own to pursue the woman, he left the matter to whoever else might stumble upon her. Instead, Murrukh was his focus.
"Draw that blade again," the cyclops warns, "you die here."
From the hip of his meager loincloth, he drew a wineskin of cracked and weathered leather, one that almost seemed to vanish in the breadth of his hand. He tossed it at the ground in front of Murrukh.
"Drink soomthin', boy, 'and cool oof afoor y'do soomthin' stupit."
* * * *
Following the boy was a feat, but not an incomprehensible one.
Thorns and briars lashed and bit. Branches broke around Mercy as she barreled into the brush, a veritable bastion of undergrowth cracking and snapping at her flight through it. Before her, none of the branches had been harmed or even shaken by the one she pursued: he, occasionally visible in a sliver of daylight, was an almost liquid presence whispering between limbs and dancing across ferns, acrobatic, nimble, and otherworldly. Still laughing, his voice a ragged chime--
"Mercy. You're
Mercy," he chirped.
Some hundred yards beyond, over fallen logs and through knotted vines of white and green strangled of light by the overzealous sun-stealing canopy above, the woods thinned. A clearing sprawled out before Mercy, and in it stood the one she followed: a
child, draped in a tattered, muddy cloak. Along his neck and crawling up to the canals of one of his wildly-pointed ears was a legion of green moss that had taken hold in his flesh. Askew and bent, a pair of spectacles was perched on his nose. Bluish lips tried to imitate a smile, a thing learned from other children. Sprouts of auburn hair lay like windswept weeds across his scalp.
Underneath his feet, a city of withered husks bowed. In circles, swirls, and concentric patterns, the proof of a vast, harvested garden was flattened beneath them both.
"Winter's awakening, and I d-...don't like it; I don't like the cold in my bones," he said. Then, leering at her, still smiling: "You smell l-...like dead little girls and boys. How is it you sleep if y-...you smell like them? You smell like everything. Whole worlds of s-...sadness, of lost lives. D-...do you smell it? I'm not blind. I'll s-...see things for you."
His head tilts. Nostrils flare and spasm.
"Do you watch the life go out of them," Phlynn asked lastly, a breathless inquiry. "When th-...their eyes reduce to tiny black dots and the soul comes out from their mouth.
"How do you
forget?"