Upon Reflection

When the last of the archer-skeletons crumbled and no more Ebonmen gurgled and flitted about, then I stood alone in the desert for a long while.

My sweat chilled me in the morning air, and then the sun soaked into my clothes and warmed me up again. Reflexively, my mind strained to interpret this and translate it into some kind of analogy for my condition. If this labor produced anything, it has since melted like a thin drift of snow and I mayn't record it here.

Tired in my limbs and tired of myself. I stared off into the featureless blue sky, an unending and consistent hue of robin's egg. No birds, no clouds. No squirrels chittered or sprinted up rough bark; no children laughed and shrieked in the distance. Biter slid from my fingers as I stood there unsteadily, entranced with nothingness, in the broad sea of sand.

The Story in the Stones

The nightmare legion assembles outside the desert temple.

To my dismay, the pyramid temple was surrounded by fell beasties, milling about as though expecting an event to erupt and coalesce them into an organized platoon—or even a company, so numerous were they. I ground my molars as my eyes adjusted to take them all in, to differentiate the Explodicons from the cacti, to pick out the tall and slender humanoids as black as the night itself, for there were a few of these about as well.

All of my senses were on high alert. Agasado, to his extensive credit, held perfectly still while I took the lay of the land. Now, I have very little skill with the base function of chivalry, that is, fighting from horseback (Old French chevaler, "knight"; Latin caballarius, "pack-horse"). I certainly had no desire to abuse Agasado's patience with grazing cuts with a sword or nasty cracks about the skull with my bow, during my preliminary learning phase, so I rode him out a certain distance to a clearing, then crept around the largest group of these predatory nasties.

The Dapple Gray and the Demesne

Now it's time for Thoreau to know the dappled stallion.

There is nothing else to do today but explore my environment. I'm now living in a desert, which heretofore has been absent in my direct experience, and as there are no other pressing concerns (save the protracted, long-term ones I've plotted), I will avail myself of the leisure.

I'm thinking of what to do with the horse. There is no hay here to feed him currently, yet he (the horse is very apparently male, before anyone chide me for crass assumptions) does not appear emaciated. Once my own garden is underway I should be able to provide for him, at any rate.

As I said, he is calm around me and does not mind the scent of human, apparently. He is outfitted with tack and harness, and his coat is a healthy mottled gray with few blemishes or scrapes. Whether he originates from here or was selected and brought hither from that wild herd I discovered so long ago, there is no way for me to tell. All I could do was assess his flanks and rub his velvety nose while trying to come up with a name for him.

Far Away, So Close

It wasn't until the second day on the sea that I realized how much I miss sailing. I hadn't done much of it back in Massachusetts, truth be told, but the opportunity presented itself fairly regularly in this unlikely world. I've sailed out of desperation, for survival and exploration, and I've sailed strictly for the leisure of it.