Characters: Ashva & Damascus Grimm Setting: Somewhere by the waterfront, in a location conductive to narrative and/or meeting other characters (someone feel free to decide where he is? He literally ran there blindly) Content: Worksafe Summary: Ashva has relocated to a nice body of water after sleeping off an injury, and is now ready to give this first contact thing a second go Status: In-progress, feel free to jump in?
Ashva awakened at last after a few days of agony and sleep to recover from it. Had the old man known? He knew something, he surely did, but how much?
The building, the church, he'd not realised - the accent, the dialect was different, and he'd not realised what a priest had entailed. Oh, the fool he had been, his mother had told him the story of her sire, her granddam, the other ancestors who'd been across to this place.
"Beware the ones who serve a Power, for they do not always only sacrifice to you. The exhilarated ones who sacrifice the horse, the blackrobes that serve their Laird. Some of them will try to bridle you..."
The friendly one, the one that talked, had made him a flower crown though, and he'd not had someone be kind to him like that. The other one, the old man, he'd not been wearing robes when he met him, and the other, he'd trusted him. If a gentle fool was safe with him, surely he was not dangerous?
Why had he not been wearing robes?
Ashva had felt the danger in the place when he entered the church, but hadn't heeded it. They hadn't stayed in the building for long anyway, and the shadow of unease passed into exhaustion. He was taken somewhere unpleasantly warm and dry to sleep but didn't argue because he thought it unwise and anyway was too tired to.
It wasn't until later, when the service was soon to begin that he was taken there again. He hadn't understood, but was left alone while preparations were taking place and so tried to. The place was wrong, he didn't know what it was, but he could feel it in the decorations, the shiny white metal that held the candles.
He put out a hand and touched one.
The agony was horrifying, the freezing horror of cold and ice, all that he'd been told iron was, but this was not iron. He didn't understand, didn't realise these other things could hurt him. What was this place that it had such horrifying things?
The panic sent him fleeing like a child, stumbling past people into the blessed dark that had since fallen, blindly towards the scent of water. One two legs at first, then hobbling on three once away from the light and those who might try to catch him.
The wound itself wasn't so unpleasant as the feeling of general exhaustion and misery that followed, and the shock of it all. He stayed underwater for a few days after that, unsure of what to do next. A meal had helped - the food had tasted of too much alcohol but had helped numb things. He made it last. The birds ate the guts.
He felt bad about leaving the talkative one without warning. Once he'd awakened he actually had wanted to hear what that one had been saying. He had been told he talked too much, yes? This one was the same? Perhaps he could have told him all sorts of things? About this world? Not about Jesus though. He'd recognised the cross only too late to be that of the warrior-thane who had conquered death. But other things perhaps? He had given him clothes.
The flower crown had fallen apart though.
Now however, Ashva was forcing himself awake in the daylight because listening and learning, like the cleverest of kelpies he was, he'd realised that the world slept with night, and so to talk to the humans he would need to be awake when they were. He wore the pants Barnabus had given him, and the shirt of the prey, because it was a pleasing shade of blue. He could hide most of the seaweed in his hair and the other tells he was not human, for a little while at least, and as long as people did not look too hard, and it was enough to at least watch them. He'd not tried speaking to one yet, perhaps now was the time?
Ashva stepped out into the street, and eyes wide with all these new things around him, started walking, ready to give this world a second try.