Chapter Text
He woke with a deep ache in his chest and a chill gripping his bones. He was prone against the damp earth, disoriented, and naked.
Time felt strange to him and he didn’t know how long he’d been here. Sitting up, he discovered, was difficult and the action made him nauseous in the end. After a moment of just breathing, he pushed himself to draw his eyes across the world that surrounded him.
The full moon was high in the starry sky, its reflection on the pockets of water around him created a faint glow. The heavy air smelled foul, coming from the wet earth and thick grasses around him, and he gradually realized he was in a wetland – one that seemed to stretch for miles and miles around him.
It took great effort for his brain to realize that this place was not familiar to him. His memories slipped like smoke through his fingers when he tried to grasp at them; all he could discern was that this was not where he belonged. But he could not remember where he did or who he was.
A few minutes passed before he could bring himself to stand, and when his head stopped spinning, he began to walk. Aimless, at first, but as time passed, the moon moved across the sky to his right. He was going south.
The night passed this way. In the strange delirium his sudden awakening had brought upon him, he stumbled through the bog without knowing where his path led. When the sky lightened after what must have been hours, a dysphoria settled on him when he realized how strangely little he’d exhausted himself.
At the crack of dawn, he stood on the edge of a pool and looked at himself.
He was different, though he couldn’t remember how he was before. His dirt-covered body was taller and leaner than what he thought he remembered. His hair seemed darker, finer, and had lengthened past his hips - oddly neat for having been lying unconscious on the ground. His ears were pointed, (something he knew was not right) and the face he stared into was unfamiliar – angular and more beautiful. His brows were still dark and thick, and his eyes a deep grey, but aside from that he was completely changed.
His head had cleared enough by then for fear to take root. Fists clenched with a slight tremor, he forced himself to kneel and took a moment to breathe. He did not know where he was or why, he could not confidently say he knew who he was much less what, and… he did not know what to do.
Keep going, a voice – calm and smooth and simultaneously familiar and foreign – rang in his mind, find running water and food. Its presence was like a cool balm smoothed over the burning of his panic. He exhaled shakily. Food where? He’d yet to see a single animal other than a frog or an insect.
Dawn is breaking, continued the voice. Look to the skies.
And by some miracle, as soon as he did, he caught the flutter of wings out of the corner of his eye as a flock of geese took to the air in the distance. The smallest glimmer of hope sprung in his heart when the voice continued: Migration. They’ll need to stop for fresh water eventually. Follow them.
So, he ran.
The sun rose high above his head, but hunger and exhaustion remained only a faint sensation at the back of his mind. High overhead he kept his eyes on the geese; they traveled much faster, but his vision seemed to carty for miles now and he was able to take good note of their direction. Even when they left his sight, he followed their path. By the time dusk began to settle, he was out of the marshland and in a large plain of golden grass. And, just as the sun tucked itself under the horizon, he came upon a river.
He still wasn’t very hungry, but his legs had started to ache somewhat, and thirst was another matter entirely. He eagerly knelt by the massive, rushing body and drank deeply, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand when he was done and letting himself lay against the earth.
Just over the crest of the opposite riverbank, he could see the subtle shiftings of the geese he had followed earlier in the day, nesting down into the grass. If that voice hadn’t told him to look, who knows how long he would’ve wandered the wetlands? In all honesty, now that he had found the river, he had no idea where he would turn next.
A problem for tomorrow, the voice assured gently, and he found himself slowly closing his eyes. Ignoring the chill (and the deep longing for covering that accompanied), he curled onto his side and pulled his hair over himself like a blanket. Whatever more problems, he would face them tomorrow, he agreed tiredly.
He slipped into unconsciousness just as the moon made its appearance in the east, and dreamed of a divine, deer-like spectre raising from a sea of trees to kiss its pale surface.