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“Hey, Heron.” Roy, balancing his casserole dinner-to-be carefully, bumps the fridge closed with a hip. He watches in mild bemusement as the giant peels off his white leather jacket. “Isn’t it kinda warm out?”
“Motorbike,” Heron explains, throwing said jacket over the back of a chair. His hair's still lank from helmet time, streaming over his shoulders like rivers of tar.
“Wow.” Roy’s brow knits, and he smirks a not-impressed kind of smirk, “You’re pretty young for a midlife crisis, don’t you think?”
Not dignifying that with a response, Heron descends upon the fridge, and proceeds to empty nearly an entire liter of milk directly down his throat in a very impressive display of lactose tolerance. Roy watches unhappily, but says nothing.
“I’ll buy more tomorrow,” Heron assures, before he does the same with a carton of orange juice.
Roy leans his elbows on the end of the kitchen bench, and offers, conversationally:
“I read this thing the other day that motorbikes pollute just as badly as cars.”
“Motorcyclists don’t live as long.”
That’s… the worst line of logic. Roy wrinkles his nose.
“I think I’d rather be alive and in a car.”
“Lunchbox drivers never live.”
Roy’s losing the will to banter anywhere along these lines, so silence stretches on for a while.
“I, um, heard about your dad. By the way.”
“Chen? Or is that fucking reaver in the news again.”
“Er, the former. I’m really sorry.”
Heron gives an indeterminate grunt. That is enough talking today.
***
Spend long enough moving under your own power exclusively, and the banality of having your own set of powered wheels becomes as mindblowing as it might have been to a neanderthal. This bike had cost a pretty penny, but fanging it down a stretch of open highway feels like a shot of meth. Good enough that Heron shuts his eyes for a second, imagines swerving into an oncoming roadtrain. But he's not allowed to die here, there's higher purpose for him now.
Further out, into the wastelands. Cauterised earth. Nothing above knee height from horizon to horizon, save for token stragglers poking from between seams of dried up patchwork farmland. These trees perceive him as a meteor flash, an instant of miraculous light. He won’t stop to soothe them...
...He looks up from his hands into the face of the teen at the gas station counter. Heron searches his eyes, trying to find something which registers as anything at all. The boy is just like the trees in the patchwork—alive, yes, but so alone he may as well not exist at all. Every human is like this.
“Anything else for today?”
Heron sets strip of jerky tombed in yellow plastic on the counter, and the boy scans it through. Would it taste like meat at all, Heron wonders. Is it meat at all anymore. Heron wonders for a moment what it might be like to lunge and take a bite from a soft, oily cheek. ...
...A gust of wind yanks the empty plastic from his fingers. He starts after it, but it dodges his grasp once, twice, thrice, before being swept up. On forever, in this silent space. Yellow patchwork, yellow sky. Unmeat still films tongue.
The night is empty as deep space. He hurtles through it, deterministic as a photon shot from a cosmic bow.
When the sun yawns and runs sleepy fingers over the Earth, now its touch traces mountains, ghosts over trees. Humanity’s black arteries perfuse this place, but there’s still wilderness here. Heron navigates on scent, now, to the road which plunges deepest into this forest’s heart. At an arbitrary point, he stops the bike.
Cool breeze combs his sweaty hair. Sweet, rich air... he can’t inhale deep enough, not with these lungs. Absently, the helmet disappears into its saddlebag. There’s room in the other for his boots. Jacket, also, must come off—no place for it, he leaves it draped across the seat. And all the rest as well—shirt, jeans, underwear, watch, seal. Stripped of human affects, he steps beneath the shadow of the trees, out on soft earth.
And soon, the valley hugs him close into its aching chest.
The host is thirsty, and sentinel redwoods point him towards a stream. The human crouches to drink. Deeper impulse pulls his face right down to the water, quadrupedal.
The host is hungry. An old patriarch steps away from his herd. Heron stands, and holds long eye contact as the stag circles nearer. He offers a hand, and the stag comes to lick the traces of salt from it. A last little treat.
“You’re allowed to run,” reminds Heron.
“Why would I run?” rhetrorises the stag, “I live for you, as you live for me.”
“Yes. But I don’t need to kill you. I have other things to eat.”
Although he pangs with hunger, and his mouth wets eagerly.
“Human things. Stolen things, cheated from the earth.” The stag’s nostrils flare. “Take my life and put it in this soil. Take my power and use it to nurture our kingdom. It is your duty, Forest King.”
“I love you,” says Heron, with slavering jaws. His muscles draw like bowstrings.
“I know,” says the stag.
Heron lunges, a burst of sharpened teeth. The stag bellows with pain, rearing up on mortal instinct. Heron tears out his throat. Heron rips hot red meat from bones, wolfs down flesh and fur. Pecks eyeballs from their sockets, pulls entrails from their cavities; picks the carcass clean with talons and teeth and mandibles and larvae and roots and bacteria. Tongues marrow and alkali metals from bones—he has a place for every molecule to live and live again, live a trillion times, a trillion ways through him for aeons until...
“You’re getting ahead of yourself, sir. You’re going to have to go back to your human life.”
Heron doesn’t face the interloper. He sits back and licks blood from his hands, a little insolently.
“You still think you can make me?”
“Yes,” Xaanik drapes cool hands over his shoulders, and tranquillity seeps through him like water through sand. “There’s nothing in this universe which does not answer to me. No planet. No forest. No worm, or man, or speck of cosmic dust.” She slips around to kneel in front of him. “I said I would preserve your humanity for as long as I can, and I’m here to do that, Heron. Open your mouth.”
And like that, he obeys.
Xaanik places a dry seed on his tongue, and as if by reflex, he swallows. She smiles.
“Good.”
Heron feels the connections breaking. The ties the forest has to each atom in him are brushed away like spiderweb. His eyes widen, and he rakes his fingers in the soil as if he can will them to become great roots. As if he can anchor himself here, before he’s sealed back inside himself.
When his fingers slacken, Xaanik stands at last, and says:
“You’ll find nothing more out here. It’s time to go home.”
Heron doesn’t move for a long time. Xaanik waits.
“Seems like a lot of effort.”
“Sir?”
He looks up at her balefully.
“All of this seems a lot of effort to go to, just to humiliate me.”
“I do no more than what is required of me, sir.”
“Required by what?”
“Isn’t it obvious?" She cradles his face in her hands and looks down into him, irises aglow like twin accretion disks. "Required by you.”
And Heron starts awake.