The dunes gave way to flatter, harder sand and slowly rising altitudes.
Here was where the wild animals actually lived--among cacti, bushes, and sparse shoots of grass; among thorny brush and grit; among flecks of crystalline sparkles in the hard-packed sand. Here, where the mountains approached, looking as if you could reach over and touch them, yet still so far away. The blue sheen of atmosphere between Moriko and them faded as she approached, and after only a scant few days of travel she could look back and see that she was, in fact, above the dunes, though the slope was so gentle it was hard to notice.
One reason she was going slowly was to be careful. She didn't want to get lost, and she didn't want to miss anything. Truly, she didn't know if there were any signs before she got into the mountains. The desert held its secrets for a long time, even in Wind Country, and there could easily be some sheltered crevice or hidden cave that led to a pathway she should be taking.
Yet another thing Wind Country was noted for was ninja--and most successful ninja knew how to find secrets. Ninja had walked these deserts for a very long time indeed, and if there was anything there that would lead to the place she sought out, surely a non-Tsurara ninja would have found it.
So the straightforward path--to the mountains, eyes open--was probably the correct route. After all, few people looked for secrets just laying there.
Most of the wildlife came out at night. Moriko did not camp all night; these days, chakra control and physical conditioning meant that she did not have to worry about a source of light or seeing. Besides, the harsh chill of the open badlands at night was perfectly comfortably to someone like her. Much more than the scorching heat of the daytime, the sun unfiltered by the blanket of night.
There was darkness at night, yes, but there was not only the light she could make. No, there was also the stars.
Each individual pinprick on its own was not much, but all together they were brilliant. One of the stories the Tsurara ancestors told about the stars was that they were sparkling stones in the sky, reflecting light like the pure white ones at the bottom of a river or stream. The wash above the skies, so visible in the wilds of Wind Country, shone the brightest as the sun was stronger there.
Of course, nowadays they knew that stars cast their own light. Yet, Moriko thought, they were probably closer to stones than they were to souls or gods. There was most likely nothing mystical about stars, aside from the light they cast on the world and the stories made about them. They were objects--all of their wonder was for those who looked up at them.
And then the moon, of course. Waxing or waning, full or new; the moon itself was most certainly a white stone, if an exceptionally large one. Right now it was nearly full, if not completely, and that light was reflected. It was the brightest thing in the sky, and it was that which cast the most light of anything up there, despite all of the visible stars.
So: most of her sleep was, like the creatures who lived there, during the hottest part of the day, with a thin, breathable cloth as a tent that stayed rolled up in her pack otherwise. She could regulate temperature regardless, but it burned chakra. Besides, just because you could regulate your own temperature and filter the light didn't make travelling during the high sun much less miserable. Fatal, not by itself; ninja didn't often get heat stroke. Not even her bloodline. But...miserable.
She moved some during the day, usually in the mornings before the sun had gotten particularly nasty, but her pace was considerably better once the sun started setting.
It had been, Moriko realized not long into this, a long time since she'd been alone. And truly, it had been rare she had been genuinely alone. Even quick ventures out of the safety of the compound and the (former) safety of Sand itself had not been far; home had always been a scamper away. Further journeys had been alongside others, most of them being stronger than her. This was the first time in her awareness where she was the only thing human as far as the eye could see.
And the eye (Crystal or otherwise) saw far in this.
A day (or a night, rather) into her walk through the badlands saw her start to sing.
The Tsurara had always been singers. Story, oral tradition, much of it was done through song. Every story Moriko had heard as a child in her family's language had been sung, her sitting and listening a little apart from the other children as the civilian elders would go on and on in stretching epics that everyone listening often lost track of by the end. She had listened not really for the music but for the words. After all, it had been intensely frustrating to her child-self that her family refused to write such things down.
'It isn't how it's done,' they'd say. 'Why not?' she'd demand, hands on her hips, as often was the byplay when it came to tradition. 'Why not do it the way I want it?' 'Because,' the elders would say, 'that is not how it is. What is, is. It is not our place to change what is.' At which point Moriko would scoff at the circular answers and dismiss the whole thing, waving it off to go back to something more concrete.
She hadn't totally changed her mind on this one, either. Moriko was rather more pragmatic than most of her relatives; if something did not have a use, or did not have a reason, then she did not have much patience for it. Hence once reason why she'd neve had a pet, despite the ubiquity of rabbits in the clan compound. What does a pet rabbit do, exactly? Nothing? Well, then. I don't want one.
But the song stories were the only way Tsurara tended to pass down clan knowledge, so the song stories were all she had to work with for this. Truly, Moriko did not expect to find signs. Her people had not written their traditions down, did not make maps, so why would they leave anything there to be found? No, she had the songs, and the song she was singing now was the one that guided the way.
(Tsukiya had expressed curiosity over these: they were not, he said, similar to either the histories or epics of Wind Country, or the ones he knew of his people. His people wrote everything down, apparently, and among the things he'd brought to the compound when moving in had been those books he'd been interested in. Moreover, his people's records were similar in some ways to the epics in that they detailed things as 'this person says this or does this,' written in the way a story would be nowadays. The Tsurara, and whatever culture they had come from, instead told every story as from the perspective of the person it was happening to.)
It was possible these lands had even heard this song before, long ago, when Tsurara still came out here as a matter of course in their journey, should their chosen life path be that of a ninja. But it would not have been for a long time.
"In the red sands
below my feet
I follow
the owl and the bat
past the cactus
past the bushes
up and up
walking on
to the clouds"
Perhaps her ancestors had gone at night, too.
The song was about an unnamed Tsurara ninja, who walked the path to the top of the mountains, and what they found once they were there. Like most of these songs, it was an epic and it was flowery. Moriko's voice was clear and smooth, rich and full; a Tsurara would always been trained to sing but her voice was deeper that the sweet, high tones it had been when she'd learned.
Still sweet, to some degree, she knew. No longer high-pitched like when she'd been young, it was more toward the middle of the scale. Range was not incredibly important for song stories, but hers was wide, and dipped and rose as she felt like it.
The words were the important part. The words told her where to go, pointed her to the right mountains--not those coated with glimmering diamond dust that all the tourists wanted to see, or in fact, as she'd thought when setting out, the ones where the family graveyard lay. There were no red sands that way. No gentle slope.
"The ground curves
under me;
the path I walk
long and flat
past the rise
past the fall.
Sand or dirt
I don't know.
Growing things
all around me
on the high plains"
The rise and fall of the dunes, of course. There was, according to the story, a great deal of walking. It was not near people--not near anything.
And you had to go alone.
"Only I
make this journey
for myself."
Which, in the end, was also why she was doing this.
"A child of the ice
of the snow
and of the sand
am I, and my kin.
For so long
It has been us
the hot and the cold
balanced only;
the heat of a soul
the cold of our blood.
I am a child of
two extremes."
That was something that came up again and again in their histories: the balance between the flame of human spirit and the ice of the Tsurara bloodline. There might be other Yuki living in Wind Country, but the Tsurara were apart from them; they embraced both the climate here and the ice in their veins.
"I live in the heat
with my family
and I walk in the sun
every day.
Yet this journey
is not like that;
I know in the heat
I move to the cold."
Up high, high and ahead, the icy peaks of the northern range that never lost their snowy caps loomed. Her destination, probably.
Hopefully.
"I journey
to find myself
and see what I am.
When I finish my pack
I find food
in the shrew my knife takes
and the flower
that blooms after rain."
Moriko had killed a few animals, here and there, to eat. She knew how to do that, too; the Tsurara taught such things even when it wasn't deemed necessary. Kill swiftly, eat what you need, break everything else and leave it for the spirits. (Or the scavengers.)
With an exception: Tsurara do not kill rabbits. Not rabbits, not desert hares, not jackrabbits. Not because they were sacred--they weren't, as far as she knew--but because they were generally not worth the trouble.
"The long-ears runs
and moves swiftly
to burrow and hide.
They are clever
and they are many;
to hunt one is foolish.
Long-ears waste time."
She probably could manage without much trouble, but at night there was no point anyway. There was plenty else to hunt without bothering the desert hares or their kin.
Walking at night also got you used to the glimmers of eyes around you. Even in the light from the moon and stars, some animals shone brightly; the foxes were the brightest, and the owls to some extent. The jackrabbits were not that bright.
Made sense, for a prey animal. Yet a flash of red still made her pause.
Moriko couldn't say why she'd paused. Nor why she halted entirely, either. After all, she was quickly able to ascertain it was just a jackrabbit, sitting on a slightly raised mound. Yes, it was between her and the moon, being ahead and thus slightly up, but it was a jackrabbit. Small and unthreatening.
After a second, she realized that despite the fact it was night, the moon the brightest light around, the jackrabbit was not silhouetted into shadow at all. The eyes had caught her, but the longer she watched it, the more obvious it became. The light on it now looked as if it alone were sitting there in the day.
And the moon behind it was slowly turning reddish-orange.
Moriko had ceased her song to stare at the jackrabbit, meeting its fearless gaze. That, too, was fine; they could be bold creatures. But the light on it--no. That was not natural.
Then it spoke--no, sung, in the same language she had been singing.
"Forest-child of ice blood
who does not harm long-ears
walking for the moon,
are you still going
this night of all nights
the moon gone to shadow?"
There was nothing in the song about this--but it was an animal, small and harmless. Right?
...Right?
"I do not need the moon
to see my way
to the cloudy peaks
I am going to."
If you are in the situation--it would be silly not to answer in kind, surely.
The jackrabbit sat up, sniffing the air, whiskers twitching. Its mouth did not move when it sang, and yet it was definitely what was doing so.
And, Moriko realized abruptly, it also knew her name--her name and her clan.
"Your steps are swift
along the ice blood path.
Long-ears watch you
we watch you closely
and we see you.
You do not need the moon
to see
but what else is here
when the moon is gone?
Do you want it
to see you?"
Fearless was one thing she had been called, and not wrongly--it took a lot to scare her. The stories Wind Country natives told about the desert this far out did include 'monsters.' Yet surely none could be worse than a sandworm...
Though it didn't have to be worse than a nightmare creature from history to be deadly.
"Do long-ears know
something else
of what lives here
that I do not see?
Is there a place
to go to
when the moon
is shadowed?"
'Not afraid' shouldn't ever mean 'reckless.' Many missions had drilled that into her head: you don't have to be afraid of something for it to hurt you.
The jackrabbit's nose twitched again. It was larger and heavier than the hares nearer Sand, with black-tipped ears and a white tuft of a tail.
"When the moon hides
long-ears hide as well
from what runs from the moon.
The long-ears in the moon
watches us
protects us
and we are grateful;
when it cannot
we burrow.
Forest-child of ice blood
come burrow
do no harm
and be safe."
It hopped off the little mound and Moriko, senses primed for a trap (what an odd trap it would be, mind), followed. The jackrabbit went up and along the slope, to a dug-in burrow that looked old. The entrance was wide enough for a slim human like her to wiggle into, and she had some doubt it would stop predators.
At least, until she followed it through a barrier.
There were many jackrabbits in here, in what was a large cavern. It looked like a burrow that had been hollowed out over centuries of them, with the sand hardening. It might only ever have been used during the darkened moon, few days a month, since jackrabbits were not social animals. But aside from the number of them and the barrier, it seemed like a normal place.
She found a place past the swarms of hares, all of them undisturbed, and set out her cloak to sleep on. Truthfully, she was more tired than she had thought; the day-night shift wasn't playing nice with her circadian rhythm. She curled up on the cloak after a drink of water and went to sleep.
When Moriko woke, it was a lot later. She had passed through the day entirely, apparently, and into the night again. The hares were gone back out into the world, and only the one she had been following, once again highlighted by unnatural sun, sat there. Watching.
"Thank you," she said. Awkwardly. She didn't know what exactly it was that the jackrabbits hid from; it could have been something harmless to humans. But this was clearly not a normal jackrabbit and would know as much.
The jackrabbit's head dipped, as if in a nod.
"Forest-child of ice blood
has kept the bargain:
safety for safety.
Long-ears tame cousins
distant kin
live with ice blood.
Long have ice blood
cared for soft long-ears.
Forest-child
does not
yet has helped before.
In return
for one who keeps bargains:
another.
Call long-ears when in need
and long-ears will come
even in sun
or dark no-moon night."
It hopped up to her and nudged her hand, and Moriko lifted it. With only the faintest feeling of a wet nose pressing to the back of it, a mark appeared in pale blue: a jackrabbit pawprint, framed by what looked like a full moon.
"I don't know if I've earned it," she said, standing slowly. "But thank you again."
She followed it out of the burrow. The sun was setting now, on the next day, but the tiredness that had been bothering her before was gone.
"Go now to your quest,
shielded by night
and the moon
in the safety
of the dark."
She nodded, but paused right before leaving the barrier. "What was it that was dangerous? You were sure it was dangerous to me too, but you didn't say."
The jackrabbit's nose twitched, this time in laughter, it seemed.
"Many things are
dangerous
even to ice blood.
What is a name?
It does not tell
or explain
the danger of the one
who runs from the moon.
There are things in the sands
you should not speak of
in case they hear you."
Ah. That kind of danger. Moriko nodded slowly, as she'd expected something like that. Some creature or being no one walked away from, that had never been named or sighted since you couldn't live if you did.
"Then I won't," she said. "Thank you again--um. Go in safety of the night as well? Even though I don't think you're a normal jackrabbit at all."
It nodded again, and hopped away, fading as she watched it. The voice did as well when it spoke up, yet she still picked up the last of it:
"Ah, forest-child
I never told you
at any point
that the one
who runs from the moon
was dangerous
to me."
That...was true.
Moriko stared where the not-jackrabbit had vanished for a moment, before exiting the shelter-burrow and tilting her head back to the near-full waning moon, then setting her sights on the mountain once more, under the shield of the moon and the stars and the night.
...Though perhaps she should hunt down a shrew for food, since it had been nearly a day since she last ate.
[Using one of my Discovery of Contract of Your Choice cards to find the 'Leporidae' contract. Topic Entered/Left.]
Here was where the wild animals actually lived--among cacti, bushes, and sparse shoots of grass; among thorny brush and grit; among flecks of crystalline sparkles in the hard-packed sand. Here, where the mountains approached, looking as if you could reach over and touch them, yet still so far away. The blue sheen of atmosphere between Moriko and them faded as she approached, and after only a scant few days of travel she could look back and see that she was, in fact, above the dunes, though the slope was so gentle it was hard to notice.
One reason she was going slowly was to be careful. She didn't want to get lost, and she didn't want to miss anything. Truly, she didn't know if there were any signs before she got into the mountains. The desert held its secrets for a long time, even in Wind Country, and there could easily be some sheltered crevice or hidden cave that led to a pathway she should be taking.
Yet another thing Wind Country was noted for was ninja--and most successful ninja knew how to find secrets. Ninja had walked these deserts for a very long time indeed, and if there was anything there that would lead to the place she sought out, surely a non-Tsurara ninja would have found it.
So the straightforward path--to the mountains, eyes open--was probably the correct route. After all, few people looked for secrets just laying there.
Most of the wildlife came out at night. Moriko did not camp all night; these days, chakra control and physical conditioning meant that she did not have to worry about a source of light or seeing. Besides, the harsh chill of the open badlands at night was perfectly comfortably to someone like her. Much more than the scorching heat of the daytime, the sun unfiltered by the blanket of night.
There was darkness at night, yes, but there was not only the light she could make. No, there was also the stars.
Each individual pinprick on its own was not much, but all together they were brilliant. One of the stories the Tsurara ancestors told about the stars was that they were sparkling stones in the sky, reflecting light like the pure white ones at the bottom of a river or stream. The wash above the skies, so visible in the wilds of Wind Country, shone the brightest as the sun was stronger there.
Of course, nowadays they knew that stars cast their own light. Yet, Moriko thought, they were probably closer to stones than they were to souls or gods. There was most likely nothing mystical about stars, aside from the light they cast on the world and the stories made about them. They were objects--all of their wonder was for those who looked up at them.
And then the moon, of course. Waxing or waning, full or new; the moon itself was most certainly a white stone, if an exceptionally large one. Right now it was nearly full, if not completely, and that light was reflected. It was the brightest thing in the sky, and it was that which cast the most light of anything up there, despite all of the visible stars.
So: most of her sleep was, like the creatures who lived there, during the hottest part of the day, with a thin, breathable cloth as a tent that stayed rolled up in her pack otherwise. She could regulate temperature regardless, but it burned chakra. Besides, just because you could regulate your own temperature and filter the light didn't make travelling during the high sun much less miserable. Fatal, not by itself; ninja didn't often get heat stroke. Not even her bloodline. But...miserable.
She moved some during the day, usually in the mornings before the sun had gotten particularly nasty, but her pace was considerably better once the sun started setting.
It had been, Moriko realized not long into this, a long time since she'd been alone. And truly, it had been rare she had been genuinely alone. Even quick ventures out of the safety of the compound and the (former) safety of Sand itself had not been far; home had always been a scamper away. Further journeys had been alongside others, most of them being stronger than her. This was the first time in her awareness where she was the only thing human as far as the eye could see.
And the eye (Crystal or otherwise) saw far in this.
A day (or a night, rather) into her walk through the badlands saw her start to sing.
The Tsurara had always been singers. Story, oral tradition, much of it was done through song. Every story Moriko had heard as a child in her family's language had been sung, her sitting and listening a little apart from the other children as the civilian elders would go on and on in stretching epics that everyone listening often lost track of by the end. She had listened not really for the music but for the words. After all, it had been intensely frustrating to her child-self that her family refused to write such things down.
'It isn't how it's done,' they'd say. 'Why not?' she'd demand, hands on her hips, as often was the byplay when it came to tradition. 'Why not do it the way I want it?' 'Because,' the elders would say, 'that is not how it is. What is, is. It is not our place to change what is.' At which point Moriko would scoff at the circular answers and dismiss the whole thing, waving it off to go back to something more concrete.
She hadn't totally changed her mind on this one, either. Moriko was rather more pragmatic than most of her relatives; if something did not have a use, or did not have a reason, then she did not have much patience for it. Hence once reason why she'd neve had a pet, despite the ubiquity of rabbits in the clan compound. What does a pet rabbit do, exactly? Nothing? Well, then. I don't want one.
But the song stories were the only way Tsurara tended to pass down clan knowledge, so the song stories were all she had to work with for this. Truly, Moriko did not expect to find signs. Her people had not written their traditions down, did not make maps, so why would they leave anything there to be found? No, she had the songs, and the song she was singing now was the one that guided the way.
(Tsukiya had expressed curiosity over these: they were not, he said, similar to either the histories or epics of Wind Country, or the ones he knew of his people. His people wrote everything down, apparently, and among the things he'd brought to the compound when moving in had been those books he'd been interested in. Moreover, his people's records were similar in some ways to the epics in that they detailed things as 'this person says this or does this,' written in the way a story would be nowadays. The Tsurara, and whatever culture they had come from, instead told every story as from the perspective of the person it was happening to.)
It was possible these lands had even heard this song before, long ago, when Tsurara still came out here as a matter of course in their journey, should their chosen life path be that of a ninja. But it would not have been for a long time.
"In the red sands
below my feet
I follow
the owl and the bat
past the cactus
past the bushes
up and up
walking on
to the clouds"
Perhaps her ancestors had gone at night, too.
The song was about an unnamed Tsurara ninja, who walked the path to the top of the mountains, and what they found once they were there. Like most of these songs, it was an epic and it was flowery. Moriko's voice was clear and smooth, rich and full; a Tsurara would always been trained to sing but her voice was deeper that the sweet, high tones it had been when she'd learned.
Still sweet, to some degree, she knew. No longer high-pitched like when she'd been young, it was more toward the middle of the scale. Range was not incredibly important for song stories, but hers was wide, and dipped and rose as she felt like it.
The words were the important part. The words told her where to go, pointed her to the right mountains--not those coated with glimmering diamond dust that all the tourists wanted to see, or in fact, as she'd thought when setting out, the ones where the family graveyard lay. There were no red sands that way. No gentle slope.
"The ground curves
under me;
the path I walk
long and flat
past the rise
past the fall.
Sand or dirt
I don't know.
Growing things
all around me
on the high plains"
The rise and fall of the dunes, of course. There was, according to the story, a great deal of walking. It was not near people--not near anything.
And you had to go alone.
"Only I
make this journey
for myself."
Which, in the end, was also why she was doing this.
"A child of the ice
of the snow
and of the sand
am I, and my kin.
For so long
It has been us
the hot and the cold
balanced only;
the heat of a soul
the cold of our blood.
I am a child of
two extremes."
That was something that came up again and again in their histories: the balance between the flame of human spirit and the ice of the Tsurara bloodline. There might be other Yuki living in Wind Country, but the Tsurara were apart from them; they embraced both the climate here and the ice in their veins.
"I live in the heat
with my family
and I walk in the sun
every day.
Yet this journey
is not like that;
I know in the heat
I move to the cold."
Up high, high and ahead, the icy peaks of the northern range that never lost their snowy caps loomed. Her destination, probably.
Hopefully.
"I journey
to find myself
and see what I am.
When I finish my pack
I find food
in the shrew my knife takes
and the flower
that blooms after rain."
Moriko had killed a few animals, here and there, to eat. She knew how to do that, too; the Tsurara taught such things even when it wasn't deemed necessary. Kill swiftly, eat what you need, break everything else and leave it for the spirits. (Or the scavengers.)
With an exception: Tsurara do not kill rabbits. Not rabbits, not desert hares, not jackrabbits. Not because they were sacred--they weren't, as far as she knew--but because they were generally not worth the trouble.
"The long-ears runs
and moves swiftly
to burrow and hide.
They are clever
and they are many;
to hunt one is foolish.
Long-ears waste time."
She probably could manage without much trouble, but at night there was no point anyway. There was plenty else to hunt without bothering the desert hares or their kin.
Walking at night also got you used to the glimmers of eyes around you. Even in the light from the moon and stars, some animals shone brightly; the foxes were the brightest, and the owls to some extent. The jackrabbits were not that bright.
Made sense, for a prey animal. Yet a flash of red still made her pause.
Moriko couldn't say why she'd paused. Nor why she halted entirely, either. After all, she was quickly able to ascertain it was just a jackrabbit, sitting on a slightly raised mound. Yes, it was between her and the moon, being ahead and thus slightly up, but it was a jackrabbit. Small and unthreatening.
After a second, she realized that despite the fact it was night, the moon the brightest light around, the jackrabbit was not silhouetted into shadow at all. The eyes had caught her, but the longer she watched it, the more obvious it became. The light on it now looked as if it alone were sitting there in the day.
And the moon behind it was slowly turning reddish-orange.
Moriko had ceased her song to stare at the jackrabbit, meeting its fearless gaze. That, too, was fine; they could be bold creatures. But the light on it--no. That was not natural.
Then it spoke--no, sung, in the same language she had been singing.
"Forest-child of ice blood
who does not harm long-ears
walking for the moon,
are you still going
this night of all nights
the moon gone to shadow?"
There was nothing in the song about this--but it was an animal, small and harmless. Right?
...Right?
"I do not need the moon
to see my way
to the cloudy peaks
I am going to."
If you are in the situation--it would be silly not to answer in kind, surely.
The jackrabbit sat up, sniffing the air, whiskers twitching. Its mouth did not move when it sang, and yet it was definitely what was doing so.
And, Moriko realized abruptly, it also knew her name--her name and her clan.
"Your steps are swift
along the ice blood path.
Long-ears watch you
we watch you closely
and we see you.
You do not need the moon
to see
but what else is here
when the moon is gone?
Do you want it
to see you?"
Fearless was one thing she had been called, and not wrongly--it took a lot to scare her. The stories Wind Country natives told about the desert this far out did include 'monsters.' Yet surely none could be worse than a sandworm...
Though it didn't have to be worse than a nightmare creature from history to be deadly.
"Do long-ears know
something else
of what lives here
that I do not see?
Is there a place
to go to
when the moon
is shadowed?"
'Not afraid' shouldn't ever mean 'reckless.' Many missions had drilled that into her head: you don't have to be afraid of something for it to hurt you.
The jackrabbit's nose twitched again. It was larger and heavier than the hares nearer Sand, with black-tipped ears and a white tuft of a tail.
"When the moon hides
long-ears hide as well
from what runs from the moon.
The long-ears in the moon
watches us
protects us
and we are grateful;
when it cannot
we burrow.
Forest-child of ice blood
come burrow
do no harm
and be safe."
It hopped off the little mound and Moriko, senses primed for a trap (what an odd trap it would be, mind), followed. The jackrabbit went up and along the slope, to a dug-in burrow that looked old. The entrance was wide enough for a slim human like her to wiggle into, and she had some doubt it would stop predators.
At least, until she followed it through a barrier.
There were many jackrabbits in here, in what was a large cavern. It looked like a burrow that had been hollowed out over centuries of them, with the sand hardening. It might only ever have been used during the darkened moon, few days a month, since jackrabbits were not social animals. But aside from the number of them and the barrier, it seemed like a normal place.
She found a place past the swarms of hares, all of them undisturbed, and set out her cloak to sleep on. Truthfully, she was more tired than she had thought; the day-night shift wasn't playing nice with her circadian rhythm. She curled up on the cloak after a drink of water and went to sleep.
When Moriko woke, it was a lot later. She had passed through the day entirely, apparently, and into the night again. The hares were gone back out into the world, and only the one she had been following, once again highlighted by unnatural sun, sat there. Watching.
"Thank you," she said. Awkwardly. She didn't know what exactly it was that the jackrabbits hid from; it could have been something harmless to humans. But this was clearly not a normal jackrabbit and would know as much.
The jackrabbit's head dipped, as if in a nod.
"Forest-child of ice blood
has kept the bargain:
safety for safety.
Long-ears tame cousins
distant kin
live with ice blood.
Long have ice blood
cared for soft long-ears.
Forest-child
does not
yet has helped before.
In return
for one who keeps bargains:
another.
Call long-ears when in need
and long-ears will come
even in sun
or dark no-moon night."
It hopped up to her and nudged her hand, and Moriko lifted it. With only the faintest feeling of a wet nose pressing to the back of it, a mark appeared in pale blue: a jackrabbit pawprint, framed by what looked like a full moon.
"I don't know if I've earned it," she said, standing slowly. "But thank you again."
She followed it out of the burrow. The sun was setting now, on the next day, but the tiredness that had been bothering her before was gone.
"Go now to your quest,
shielded by night
and the moon
in the safety
of the dark."
She nodded, but paused right before leaving the barrier. "What was it that was dangerous? You were sure it was dangerous to me too, but you didn't say."
The jackrabbit's nose twitched, this time in laughter, it seemed.
"Many things are
dangerous
even to ice blood.
What is a name?
It does not tell
or explain
the danger of the one
who runs from the moon.
There are things in the sands
you should not speak of
in case they hear you."
Ah. That kind of danger. Moriko nodded slowly, as she'd expected something like that. Some creature or being no one walked away from, that had never been named or sighted since you couldn't live if you did.
"Then I won't," she said. "Thank you again--um. Go in safety of the night as well? Even though I don't think you're a normal jackrabbit at all."
It nodded again, and hopped away, fading as she watched it. The voice did as well when it spoke up, yet she still picked up the last of it:
"Ah, forest-child
I never told you
at any point
that the one
who runs from the moon
was dangerous
to me."
That...was true.
Moriko stared where the not-jackrabbit had vanished for a moment, before exiting the shelter-burrow and tilting her head back to the near-full waning moon, then setting her sights on the mountain once more, under the shield of the moon and the stars and the night.
...Though perhaps she should hunt down a shrew for food, since it had been nearly a day since she last ate.
[Using one of my Discovery of Contract of Your Choice cards to find the 'Leporidae' contract. Topic Entered/Left.]
