The Kindreds, Volume 1

The Eleventh, Pt. 7

Sada finished her fruit quickly, but without satisfaction or enjoyment. The filly looked positively dejected now, lying with her chin on her foreleg, and Sada found that she had little appetite with her friend looking so downcast. Every attempt she made to offer the filly fruit was rejected. Eventually she gave up, standing and flicking imaginary dust off of her cloak. She left the uneaten berries laid out on the moss, not wanting to carry them with her. The animals would finish it. Now that she knew some of the forest's fruit would not harm her, she would be more apt to eat straight from the tree in the future.

Sada did this as she and the caelicorn continued walking. She first came upon a lovely peach tree, whose trunk was covered in the same thin dusting of gold that its fruits were. When she bit into the fruit, the dust was slightly sour, offering a delightful contrast to the sweetness. She also allowed herself to eat of the whispering berries, whose voices were unsettlingly silenced upon chewing and swallowing the fruit. She had only a few of these. She knew the fruit wasn't alive (thought so, anyway), but it was too disconcerting to pop one into your mouth as it was whispering, How do'ee do Madam? And jolly, jolly, racoon folly! and then to hear it slowly fade away before dropping away to silence as it was swallowed.

"Quite perturbing, isn't it?" she had asked the caelicorn about the hushed voices. "Do you enjoy berries? I've always been fond of blackberries, but I find the raspberries to be too tart. Do you agree?"

She was not answered.

Next she moved onto the oranges dangling from fragrant yellow leaves. When peeled open, the exposed fruit emitted a faint golden glow. She was also delighted to see that these citrusy fruits were not coated with that horrible white webbing which picky eaters like herself had to pluck off before eating the fruit it encased.

All of these fruits she presented to Lady Blue. Yet the filly turned her nose up at each. The peaches she offered a perfunctory sniff, but the end result was the same. After Sada had eaten her fill and was feeling guilty over the fullness of her belly when the filly's was surely empty, she threw a glowing orange to the ground in exasperation.

"Is there anything that will please you?" she cried. But still, Lady Blue would not answer in that voiceless whisper of hers. She only turned to continue on in that wayward direction of hers, tail swishing and hooves rustling in the grasses.

Sada was left with no choice but to follow dismally. The fruits did not sustain her for long. After just half an hour of walking, her stomach was rumbling with a greater fervor than it had for her entire journey thus far. It seemed that eating the berries and peaches and oranges had only awakened h er appetite; once dormant, it was now an angry, roaring thing. As she followed Lady Blue's golden tail, hands crossed over her growling and gurgling stomach, she began to wonder if there was any food in this forest besides fruit.

Her silent wondering was answered later that afternoon.

.  .  .

As the sun had just set to that perfect height where everything was painted in a glow (usually golden, but in this world it was a soft rose) that made it ten times as beautiful as it typically was, Sada and Lady Blue reached a part of the forest decorated in vines. Each trunk was wrapped in a tight robe of them, like Sada on a chilly morning, and they hung from the high branches in lovely green drapes. Growing from each braided strand were clusters of little pink and lemon-yellow flowers. The vines were so thick and numerous that she could not see beyond an arm's-length at any given moment, and she had to walk with a hand on Lady Blue's neck so as not to lose her when the emerald curtains swished closed behind her blue flanks. Sada's eyes watered at the beauty, and when she trailed a hand across the beautiful plants, her instincts lit up with delight.

"I think the beauty may be too great for my heart to bear," she whispered to the filly. She was looking at her own arm, captured by a beam of light and bathed in pink and brightness. Each little hair that stood on end in her awe was illuminated in it, and every pore it grew from could be seen as well. As for Lady Blue, she could hardly stand to look at her. Sada's heart was one of both an artist and a romantic, and when she saw the beauty of the caelicorn in the afternoon glow, she felt only desperately tragic that it could not be captured with a brush and paints, or with words of a poem on paper. She thought that if she had the latter as well as a quill, she would write:

Daughter of the sky, o' lady of blue,

How your hide is a cruel shade of beauty

Don't wound me so with this splash of azure,

For the pain is pointless when the sight is so fleeting.

If I cannot capture it, let it not be so

My heart cannot stand the torture

Your golden curls are like an angel's hair

On complimentary wings, I would be brought to my closure.

In that perfect light which made all things beautiful, those which already were became nearly painful to look at. The caelicorn's long, cerulean fur looked like the finest of silk, and that which decorated her feet like tassels looked so perfect it must have been sewn in place. Her golden curls shone so brightly, Sada truly could not look at them. If she did, her eyes throbbed with a blissful ache. And the horn. The horn was a thing of magnificence. With perfectly crafted spirals, it looked to be carved from a solid golden ingot. Something terrible and greedy in Sada's heart wanted it for her own. But the feeling was fleeting and not of herself. For when it passed, her heart ached in joy not at the beauty of the caelicorn, but that the two of them should be friends.

Lady Blue felt all of this transmitted through the hand that was placed just behind her ears. She twitched them appreciatively. Sada didn't realize that part of her bliss was coming from the caelicorn herself. Yet suddenly all of their glowing happiness was shocked by a jolt of surprise, and the brief static of fear. It was like a lightning bolt suddenly coming down on a serene lake.

The caelicorn halted in her steps, snorting and pawing the ground. Sada was more silent in her apprehension. Her fingers curled into the filly's mane and her gaze darted around, eyes trying to find the source of her friend's startle.

What is it? I see nothing, where do you sense— she thought.

Then she saw. The orange ears of a fox, that elegant swoop of the nose, and those cunning dark eyes. The grin set into that muzzle. Immediately the image of the nine-tailed fox and its evil golden gaze was behind her eyes; its white muzzle had been stained maroon with blood. Then she saw the caelicorn's memory of it: the furry body lying dead on its side in the moss and ferns, not a bloody muzzle but a bloody belly from which she fed—

Suddenly the fox's thin muzzle lifted into the air. Its lips pulled back as it sniffed once. Those colorless eyes slid to Sada. Beside them she abruptly noticed the two wider but just as colorless eyes of a rabbit. Finally the third pair of dark orbs turned to her, these belonging to a raccoon. Her throat tightened.

"They're only animals," she told Lady Blue, who was still standing stiffly beneath her hand. But even though she tried to make herself sound calm and comforting, her stomach turned with unease.

Something is amiss, the filly thought. Sada soon saw what that was.

The fox raised a paw in greeting. Cuffed just below the brown pad of its foot, buttoned tight around its thin russet wrist, was the tweed fabric of a suit. The fox grinned a sickeningly human grin, and it began to wave, its entire upright body rocking as it did. Sada's stomach turned. Lady Blue's own sense of foreboding entered her mind as the filly thought, Kindreds above and Elt below...

Is this the same as the evil we sensed at the Sprite's spring? Sada thought.

Nay, this is not yet evil, simply...wrong.

Sada agreed. Her left arm was vibrating within itself, and her reflexes screamed at her to get away from this unnatural...uncanny...creature, like a doll come to life. She moved to back away, to turn and run, but then the fox-man called out.

"Hail, friends!" he said in a chirping and accented voice. "Hail to a lovely afternoon!"