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2/7/07 - 3/7/07 - Ill


4/7/07 - A Cry on the Wind [Geneisoon Campaign]

         The sky was dim blue, tinged with violence, like Decepticon towers seen from a distance. The clouds piled up behind the black-capped mountains in grumbling shovelfuls, promising rain and wet ash. Ravage felt the first dirty drop tap on his muzzle and shook it off. He lay down in the shelter of a sheaf of grizzled stone, worn lopsided by centuries of wind, and listened.
         Down in the valley, flat-floored, green with springy bryophytes, dappled with dark sphagnumoids, he could hear the low churl and rickle of the many little streams, their water dark with ashes. The wind skirled down the mountainsides, fluffing the black snow into puffs of wet grey drizzle, shaking the miniscule leaves of the bryophytes and flecking them with dirty snow-ash. Beyond the mountains, the preludes of thunder crumped and crunched.
         Thin within the sounds of autumn dying came the faint cry, the last wailing edge of a distant howl. Ravage sat up, fixing the sound, listening as its high echoes shivered off the flanks of the mountains. The sound moaned across the slopes, shaggy-brown with shaking shrubs, shuddered off the broad knurls of grey stone that tore through the soil like broken bones. The spattered coats of white and yellow lichen-likes quivered with the sound, dusting the air with pale spores. The cry faded, distant, lonely, thin and bitter. Ravage slipped out from the shade of the boulder and into the patter of ashy rain.
         The slope of the hill he descended was damp, soft-turfed, the bright-dewed heather-shrubs rustling as he ran through them, careless of sound. There was nothing to hear his passing, the brush of brittle brown leaf over dirt-speckled armour, nothing but himself and the crier in the distance. Overhead the sky bruised slowly into storm-dark. Flecks of rain flicked Ravage's ears, his muzzle, ticked on his shoulders and flanks. They wetted the drab stains of travel and hung bright on his sharp edges. He wasted no energy in crying back to the lonely voice as it wandered in the wildness, hundreds of miles from anyone, nor on clumsy flight so far from any source of fuel.
         The valley floor was wet, the thick bright carpet of bryophytes bouncing under his paws. The first drifts of rain bedewed his legs, sparkling on his black ankles. His feet were only clean because of the wetness; the rest of him was dirty, drab, peat-soiled, ash-spattled, spore-mottled. He felt his paws sink into the black peat beneath the sphagnumoids, the thin dirt oozing around his toes. Disgusted, he picked up his paws and trod lightly, silently cursed the water that slowed him to a cautious test-and-leap amongst the sagging sods and low mounds of tussock-clump. The peat-muck sloshed, the glassy-grey water shone beneath him, the slow currents of the little rills laughing at his dirtiness, his tiredness, his distance from civilization.
         In the middle of the valley he found a low mound, perhaps a bulk of stone overgrown by the wind-waving bryophytes, and flopped down on it. He lowered his head onto his forepaws and waited as the rain dappled his hull, stippling him with microfloriate freckles.
         Should I turn back? he wondered, thinking of the twelve days of marshy valleys and rocky hills behind him, the trackless expanse of the Genesaii uplands. Turning back was turning towards an abandoned base, an unsolved vanishing, an uncaught quarry, a failed mission. Turning back was admitting his twelve days were wasted, that his quarry had outrun him even though it tracked back and forth aimlessly, although it stopped and bayed to the wind. Its lead had been two days when he set out, bright-welded from repair, hungry for an answer, and now it cried out so near he could almost track it by sound.
         No one ordered me on this hunt but myself, and no one shall call me back but Megatron. He smiled a faint smile of cold irony. If Megatron ordered him back then there was no need to keep hunting, keep tracking, keep following that faint, thin cry in the distance. Ravage raked the mound with his claws, furrowing the bryophytes and baring grey stone. I have come to this lonely place for a purpose, and I shall not turn back whilst I have the fuel to go on. No secrets, crier in the wind; I am come for your name.
         He had no doubt he was closing on the Beast. He had heard its cry, constant, wailing, lost, calling every few hours, calling but either not hearing or not heeding any answer. He had followed its voice, its paw-prints, the torn soil thrown up when it found ground firm enough to run, the heaved-up boulders where it had rooted for something Ravage could not identity. He had followed it for twelve days, ever since he had awoken from a blow he could not remember with wounds he could not recall.
         Some beast, some creature with paws as big as his shoulders had torn him. Something with teeth as thick as his leg had bitten him, half-crushed him, then tossed him aside and left him as irrelevant.
         The emptiness in his mind, the space where the memory had failed to rest, did not trouble his cool still mind. It was the triple jaws that had broken his back, the fangs that had pierced his sides, the claws that had raked him, the strong neck that had thrown him aside; they haunted him.
         Was it you, friend and master? he wondered in the flicker of grey rain. Was it you that mauled me? Was it you that tore open the base and fled into the night? Is it you that wanders the wild, crying and hearing no answer?
         Below him, pressed into the peat, crushing down the soft stems of the sphagnumoids, was the great paw-print of the Beast of Genesaii. Ravage stretched out a foreleg and rested his own forepaw inside the great pug; it swallowed his foot completely. Any one of the four clawed toes was nearly as big as his whole paw. The central pad, that had crushed the peat down as deep as Ravage's ankle, was wider then both his forepaws together.
         Is it you? he asked the paw-mark. Did another come in the night and rend the base? Did I fall protecting you? Did you fall to it? Where is your body? Where are you?
         Ravage rose from the mound and leapt onwards, picking a path over the green carpet, listening for the far-off wail. The water flowed bitter with the ashes of past-burned peat. The wind swirled and flared, spattering his body with grey flecks, mottling him like the highland stone. He listened for the sound of jets approaching, perhaps homing in on Megatron's silent transponder, perhaps searching the mountains for their lost leader, perhaps coming to fetch him back. He hoped for the sound of jets, for the rumbling that was not thunder, but heard nothing.
         Just the wind and the water, and the cry of the beast.

Date: 2007-07-06 02:19 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] lunatron.livejournal.com
Needs more Ravage, less scenery.

Date: 2007-07-10 03:16 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] koilungfish.livejournal.com
Well, I was rather trying to evoke a sense of place more than anything else ...

Date: 2007-08-24 11:07 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ravenclaw-devi.livejournal.com
If it's any comfort, I liked the 'scenery'. It's very atmospheric.

Date: 2007-07-27 05:59 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] seiberwing.livejournal.com
Y'know, I'm not debating your right to post your stuff as you want, but it's still rather hard to read when it's all jammed together like that.

Date: 2007-07-28 12:16 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] seiberwing.livejournal.com
No spaces between paragraphs.

Date: 2007-07-28 12:13 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] koilungfish.livejournal.com
I really do not understand this "web format" thing for prose text. Spreading the paragraphs out like cows in a field is, I find, nigh-on unreadable. I format my text the same way it would be formatted if it was in a book. I don't understand why everyone else finds this so hard to read - or does nobody else here read books? :: baffled::

Date: 2007-07-28 01:55 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] seiberwing.livejournal.com
It's different on a screen, I think. It's easier on my eyes, anyway.

Date: 2007-07-29 02:14 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] koilungfish.livejournal.com
I find it almost impossible to read text that's got space between paragraphs. It's like trying to read a sentence where one half is on the left of the screen, then there's a gap in the middle of the screen, then the other half of the sentence on the right.

Date: 2007-07-29 04:47 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] seiberwing.livejournal.com
*shrug* Then suit yourself.

Date: 2007-08-24 11:16 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ravenclaw-devi.livejournal.com
I like this, both the description of Ravage's mind/emotions, and that of the surroundings. I could practically smell the ground under his paws.

Small nitpick, though: "He had followed its voice, its paw-prints, the torn soil thrown up when it found ground firm enough to run, the heaved-up boulders where it had rooted for something Ravage could not identity." - shouldn't it be "identify"?

Date: 2007-08-24 12:20 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] koilungfish.livejournal.com
Heh, glad someone likes it. It can't really stand on its own, given how much background it needs to make sense, but I'm glad it did what it was written to do - to convey the sense of place.

Argh, typos.

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