| shiz |
[Jun. 11th, 2007|09:10 am] |
The creature didn’t frighten her, not really. Ofelia watched as it began to move, placing one strange, hunched limb in front of the other tentatively as though it had forgotten how to walk. One stilted step it took, and then another, and with each step taken after that it seemed as though it was growing familiar with the movements once again. Taking notice of her awed quiescence, it turned its strange head to her and regarded her in similar silence.
“Who are you?” She asked finally, her voice thin and reedy; it echoed off the cavern walls and resonated around them both.
The creature let out a long sigh. “I am old,” it told her in a voice both deep and sonorous which held a raspy edge that spoke of a long time without use. It was also undeniably the voice of a male. “I am so old that only the wind remembers my name.”
His face was not a human face. It was wide and round, the nose flattened and the broad forehead marked with strange spiral ridges. His eyes were large and almond shaped, without iris or pupil, and they were a luminous pale blue in the darkness as they watched her intently. His ears were almost bovine in nature, protruding straight out from the sides of his head. Two great ram-like horns rose from his head and curled under. His hair, falling from beneath the horns, was lank and long, hanging in bright green tangles and reminding Ofelia of some of the mosses she had seen on her travels through the nearby forest. The creature endured her scrutiny in without a word, blinking as it peered intently back at her.
“What are you?” She finally asked.
He smiled, revealing even white teeth—the teeth of an animal, not of man. “I am the mountain. I am the river.” He began to walk again on his strange legs; they were very similar, she realized suddenly, to the hind limbs of a goat. His gait, which should have been awkward and ungainly, was strangely graceful as he circled the pillar between them. He continued, “I am the earth and the air and the trees. I am the guardian of this gate. I am the loyal servant of His Royal Highness. But, under all of those,” and here he paused, standing still now and facing her, “I am a faun.”
“A faun?” Ofelia echoed. She had never heard of such a thing.
“Yes,” he told her, nodding; this close she could see his skin was pitted like that of an ancient tree, and that bits of bark and leaves were tangled in the lengths of his hair. “And I have been waiting for you here for a very long time.”
“Why me?”
The faun smiled again and took a step towards her. He was very tall, and now loomed over her; she had to crane her neck back in order to stare up at him. He bent suddenly, reaching out and cradling her face between his hands; his touch was cool, soft and alarming.
“You are a princess,” he told her. His breath smelled of damp earth, and he carried with him other scents as well—that of fresh rain, of wildflowers, of grass, of the wind at night as it wove through the leaves of the forest. He stroked her cheek with one long, spindly thumb, its nail dark and hard as onyx. “You are our princess. Your father bade us wait here for you. He knew you would return someday.”
“I-I am Ofelia,” she stammered; he was strange, and he was close, and he spoke of things she did not know. “My father was a tailor—”
“Hrrgh!”
Startled at the noise, Ofelia jerked free of the faun and stumbled back a step. He made no move to follow, instead waving his hand before him in a blatantly negative gesture; his ears twitched with his agitation. “You are not of them—your father is the King of the Underworld. Up here, in this world, it was the moon that bore you. Look at the skin of your shoulder and you will see the proof.” Ofelia’s hand strayed up to touch said shoulder as he spoke, her eyes widening even further. How had he known? “You are the Princess Moanna, and you have come to return home.”
This is my home, she started to say, but the words never left her mouth as she realized them for a lie. So instead she shook her head mutely as she remembered the words he’d just said to her, the words she’d heard in almost every one of her daydreams, and wondered when she would awaken.
“No dream,” he told her, shaking his head; a large black beetle fell from within the tangle of his hair, and his ears shook again. He stepped towards her again, holding out his hands imploringly. “This is truth, Highness.” |
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solain's journal
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