The Beginning
Had to delete and reupload this, sorry. ;w;
FYI: I write in a rambling stream of conscious way, things might seem very disjointed!
Please take into consideration the content warnings after chapter 1! All characters are 18 and older.
Also, yes, you are supposed to be violently pulled out of the story due to Shayih's weird internal dialogue, that's part of the fun. ;3
Shayih's story. :3
The Beginning - 1
Chapter 00 - In all things that die and rot, there is life
He was just a small bat, barely higher than his pa's knees. He remembered looking up at what seemed, at the time, a monolithic individual, so tall and powerful as to be unstoppable, moonlight haloed behind him as they overlooked the wheat fields before them. The ones that pa told him that he and his ma had planted when they found this mountain and built the very cabin he was born in. The very ones that they harvested and milled themselves to bake the bread that suffused the home with such warmth.
His pa was a stoic man, never one for much emotions or talking, truly, so whenever pa talked, he listened. Listened as hard as a young bat could and took those words to heart. So when that man looked down at him, at his small diminutive frame as they stood there and watched the fields of gold sway gently in the nighttime breeze, he listened with everything in him to the words his pa told him.
"Now listen here, boy," his pa said, "And listen well." The man fell silent and looked down at him with the most serious expression his young mind had seen so far. "You listening yet?" his pa asked him and he nodded his head as hard as he could. He was listening.
"Good," his pa told him and fell silent once again. He watched his pa look back out over the fields and take a deep breath before he looked down at him once more. "Shayih."
He nodded, he was listening just like pa wanted him to.
"Shayih," his pa repeated, "Son. I want you to remember this and remember it well."
He nodded again, looking as serious as a tiny young bat no taller than his father's knees could.
"You must never, under any circumstances, hurt the people," his father finally said. Shayih looked up at his father confused at the notion because why would he ever hurt another bat? It seemed ludicrous. His pa shook the paw that he was using to grip the man's pant leg.
"Do you understand, Shayih?" his father asked him, sounding even more stern, "Do you understand what I'm telling you?"
He looked up at his pa and nodded with all the conviction and self assurance that only the very young could possess.
"Good," was all his pa said before the man returned his focus back out onto the swaying fields of gold illuminated by the light of the full moon.
He made a promise to himself that night. No matter what may come or what the future holds for him, he would never harm another bat and while he didn't have any inclination to do so before, now he promised the stars and moon that he never would. With a determined nod, he let go of his pa's pant leg and ran out into the fields of wheat, racing to catch all the grasshoppers that jumped around him as he disturbed their concert with his feet.
He was a gangling teen, not quite as tall as his pa but certainly getting there. He looked down at the diminished form of the man he looked up to all his life. The man that looked so small laying there, sick, in his bed. Nothing but loose skin and fur sagging off of brittle bone, veins and arteries prominent as small blood spots dotted the older bat's arms and legs. He remembers his pa reaching out a shaking paw to him with that same serious look he remembered seeing so long ago when he was nothing more than a chubby faced small child.
He took his pa's paw within his as he knelt next to that bed, watching his father struggle to breathe.
"Now listen here boy," his pa wheezed out to him, "And listen well..." His pa trailed off as another wet coughing fit wracked his frame. The man beat at his chest, trying to dislodge that which is suffocating him but it's no use. For, once again, nothing comes up. Nothing has ever come up and only this very specific angle allows his pa to reliably breathe and talk without feeling like he was drowning. What was it like, he wondered, to know that your very body was the one forcing you under the water to die?
"Are you listening?"
He nodded, looking as serious as he could in that awkward stage between child and man.
His pa gave a small smile. "Good," is all he said before he stopped to take a few wheezing breaths, looking up at the ceiling of their cabin that he and ma built together so many years ago. He watched his pa chew on the inside of his cheek, the same ones hollowed out through not being able to keep anything down. His pa thought he couldn't hear but walls were thin, doors were often left open just in case, and he heard his pa vomit out the blood he swallowed as his very insides hemorrhaged through the veins and arteries meant to transfer blood around the body. The same system meant to keep his pa alive.
"Shayih... Son, I want you to remember this..."
He waited patiently as he gently squeezed the thin brittle bones in his pa's paw held within his own. He always listened to his pa even when he didn't want to, even when he felt that need to claw and bite for any modicum of freedom when his pa's authority chafed at him.
"Shayih... I've taught you everything I know on how to keep going when I learned that I wasn't going to make it," his father wheezed out with resignation, "And don't fight me, boy, you know it won't get better."
It was an old argument but even he knew that it would only be a miracle if he saw his father stand out of that bed, stand tall once more, and walk without that wheezing wet cough that choked and suffocated him.
"But I want you to remember this and remember it well," his pa spoke with as much conviction and authority as was inside his soul, the only thing that hasn't buckled and withered under the sickness that is stealing his pa away, "You must keep going, Shayih, don't stop. Keep putting one foot in front of the other."
He thought it a ludicrous notion, after all, he always knew that he would outlive his pa, that's just the way of the world that they live in. He didn't expect it so soon but on a bone deep level, deeper than the very marrow that produced his blood, he knew that he would live long after his pa passed.
His pa gave a weak squeeze of his paw, enough to jolt him out of his musings. "Do you understand what I'm saying, Shayih?"
He swallowed hard but nodded all the same. He knew on a logical level that, yes, he would keep going in the wake of his father's passing. He nodded with his head bowed, willing the tears to not fall as things sank in all at once that, perhaps, this was the last time he'd ever hear his father's voice again or see the spark of life in those eyes. He missed the smile his pa aimed at his direction but he felt his pa's paw leave his and then felt it settle on his head, giving as firm a pat as it ever did between his broad ears.
"Good," his pa quietly told him, almost too quiet to be heard over the sounds of the night's symphony outside their cabin.
He recalled looking out the window of their cabin one warm spring night only but a few days since his pa told him to listen, the moon high and bright and the wind a gentle breeze that lacked the future promise of rain. All in all, it was the perfect weather to do laundry. With that settled, he stepped into his pa's room to tell the older bat as such, seeing as now his pa was too weak and ill to leave his bed anymore.
"I'm going to do the laundry, pa, do you need anything in the meantime?" he asked with as much soft optimism as he could put into his voice. His pa liked it better when they pretended things were normal, was less argumentative and belligerent, and he figured that the least he could do in these end days was to allow the man to lead the last days of his life with dignity.
"No, son..." His pa wheezed out, "Think I'll just take a nap... Make sure you get my flannels, Shayih..."
"Gotcha," he replied and left his father to gather up the older bat's dirty clothing from the basket in the corner of the room, as little as it is. Even in the end when he had to help dress him, his pa refused to go a day without getting dressed. He gave a small wave and departed the room carrying a small armful of a few flannel shirts and a pair of trousers, barely in need of washing as his pa could no longer leave the bed beyond relieving himself.
He saw his pa nod at him before the older bat closed his eyes and fell into a restless sleep.
As he exited the cabin with his own washing, he made a few mental notes to check the cabin for anything he'd need to fix in the next few days before he has to get the last of the spring crops in the ground and thus will not have time for it anymore.
Laundry was his most hated chore as hand washing all the garments took hours to get the stains and smells out, especially since he spent hours under the sun and was constantly sweating to the point several parts of his body became nothing more than a swamp by the end of the day. Eventually, though, after his arms felt like they were going to fall off with all that scrubbing on the washboard, he was able to clip the laundry to the lines and admired them gently swaying and dancing in the breeze. It was as if the ghosts of the mountain had taken residence inside their shirts and trousers. He shook his head with a sardonic smile at his own childish musings, he was almost an adult after all, before he set out to take a quick look at the crops he had planted several weeks ago.
As he stepped into the gate that held the garden and walked the lines of mulched dirt, hay sticking to his feet every step or so, he crouched down occasionally to pluck out a tenacious weed that had managed to peak itself out of the ground cover. He would look at the little plants with pity before dropping them back down to desiccate upon the old hay. Thus was life. As he got to the end of this row, he crouched down and admired the peas he had planted at the end of the last frost and was filled with a sense of wonderment at how they reached and crawled up the poles, searching ever higher as they tried to maximize the amount of sunlight they could harness. He reached a delicate claw out to gently bounce the little curly-cues that directed the growth of the plants. He laughed, just a soft one, at the simple joy of watching life begin its journey.
With one last look at the peas, he stood up and made his way back to the cabin. It was now late in the night, about the time he would start making dinner, so he headed to his pa's room to see what the man would like to try and choke down. Usually it wouldn't stay but his pa told him it was about enjoying the taste and textures of the small bites of food he could swallow anymore and not what the food could do for him. The nutrients and calories weren't doing a thing for him anymore, his pa had told him, seeing as there's nothing left in his body.
He knocked on his pa's doorframe to announce his presence, "Hey, pa, what do you feel like eating tonight?" he called into the quiet room. Too quiet. His pa was never quiet, not when he was healthy and not now, when his wheezing breaths and wet coughs would fill the inside of the cabin at all hours.
"Pa?" he asked even though he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that his pa wouldn't answer him anymore. He looked down at the bed where his pa's skinny frame lay, looking even smaller than it did just several hours earlier, and watched as the older bat's chest did not move. He reached out a shaking paw to gently lay over his pa's chest and, still, could detect no movement. His pa remained stiff and unyielding beneath his palm.
He knelt there next to the bed, taking his father's paw in his own for he knew he would regret it for the rest of his life if he didn't, and finally wept for the inevitability of this situation and also the injustice of it all. Wept as everything around him changed but yet he was stuck here, in this moment, weeping over the corpse of the man he had looked up to for all his remembered life.
It's ironic that the last thing he said to his pa was something as mundane as the laundry.
Thus was life.
He gathered up his pa in the older bat's sheets and gently carried the too light and frail body, still slightly warm due to the trapped heat of the bed covers, out of the cabin and gently laid the corpse of the man in the soft grasses near the windmill. He looked over at his ma's grave marker before departing to the shed to grab a shovel.
He buried his pa next to his ma underneath the windmill that overlooked the wheat fields. It was an arduous yet mindless task, as he dug deep into the earth of the mountain, deep enough so that the wrapped body next to him would be safe to decompose into nothing more than dust and bones in relative peace. It took half the day but eventually he had a hole that was big enough, deep enough, that he could then gently lay his pa's stiff body, joints now riddled with rigor mortis, to rest down in it. Crawling out of the hole, he took one last look at the body of his father, before shoveling dirt back into the hole he had just dug. Exhaustion and sorrow dragged at his muscles, tears clouding his vision, as he piled shovel full of dirt after shovel full of dirt atop the body of the man, the father, he would never see again.
When the hole was filled, when there was no more dirt left to pack back into the earth, he knelt at the end of the mound and felt that all his tears had dried. He set out to the shed and fashioned a crude grave marker, one made of three planks of wood, and hammered it into the ground at the very top of the dirt mound. He looked at the grave marker, the spine holding up two different lengths parallel to the ground, and collapsed to his knees in an exhausted heap. He knelt there for an unknown amount of time, minutes, hours, lifetimes... His thoughts an incomprehensible mess of cacophonous noise and deafening silence.
A breeze tickled his hair, making the strands swirl about his ears, as the afternoon's winds brought about the smells of the mountain's forest and wildflowers.
"Shayih," he heard his father say to him, "You must keep going, Shayih, don't stop."
And so he stood, his legs both numb and aching from kneeling so long, and returned to their cabin. His cabin. The cabin filled with ghosts.
He collapsed into his bed and lay there, unable to fall asleep, as he stared listlessly at the ceiling. He looked at the subtle cracks in the plaster, the ones he's known for all of his life, for an indeterminate amount of time, feeling sleep tugging at his conscious but never quite getting there as his thoughts spiraled in indistinct patterns and colours, never quite coalescing into anything coherent.
Eventually, who knows how much later as his thoughts never quite stopped, he fell asleep. The combination of emotional exhaustion and the exhaustion that comes with staying up close to two full nights finally having his body shut down for rest.
The cabin was cold, but yet the cabin was always cold these days. It was the end of the second winter since he had said goodbye to his pa. To the world he was now considered a man, to others looking in who saw that he maintained the cabin and the fields of wheat that swayed in the night winds under the windmill and the gardens that grew the produce he cooked with alone, he was an independent and successful adult.
To Shayih, however, he still felt like that gangly teen that held his father's paw and wept at his bedside. The small innocent chubby faced boy that looked up at his pa's stoic face. Sure, the pain wasn't as intense anymore and he did as his father asked of him by still going, but he still felt mired and stuck.
And so very very cold.
It didn't matter how much wood he stocked or how well the fire burned, the cabin was cold and quiet. Colder than the snows that sometimes trapped him inside for days at a time, unable to leave and explore the mountain in winter. Unable to gather more wood, chop more wood that would never dry out quick enough to be useful, keep himself busy with what repairs he could feasibly due. Keep his mind busy.
He lay there upon the carpet of the main room and watched the fire burn away in the stove that kept the cabin heated. He wished he could become the fire, to finally feel warm again, instead of laying on the carpet and listening to the winter winds whip around the mountain forest outside. What a life fire must lead, he idly thought, to be as ephemeral as the transformation of energy from one source to another. He reached out a listless paw towards the stove but he was too far away to touch it. Too far away to burn himself.
He made a promise to himself that night. Come the first winds of spring, he would go down the mountain. He promised the stars and the moon that he would find warmth and that the cabin would never be this cold ever again.
CONTENT WARNING: Vomit, feces, necrophilia
The Beginning - 2
The beginning 2 - A tundra of the heart
Although, as Shayih came to realize, making a promise is much easier to do than actually keeping to it.
He was outside now, chopping the woods that heated the too cold cabin. The very cabin that never felt warm no matter how hot the fires burned. The action warmed his muscles, kept his body moving, but it never quieted his mind. No, he would say that it only exacerbated his current problem. Left with simple manual labor that he could do sleepwalking, his mind was left to wander in the in-between moments where axe raised, came down, and neatly split the manageable log before him. The middle moments where he bent down to pick up another log to set upon the stump he used, that his pa used before, to chop the wood. Some of these logs wouldn't be useful in their current state, the logs still too damp with water and sugars to ever burn cleanly, but it was movement.
Motion. Travel. Up and down, up and down, the axe swings up and the axe swings down. The moon rises as the sun sets, winking out as the midday sun becomes too much to bear, only to reappear as the sun descends below the mountains and allows the stars to say their hellos.
The bat laments his current predicament for there is nothing to occupy his thoughts.
Many things had to be considered before he travelled down the mountain to relieve himself of the duty of existing as nothing more than a thing. An object. A changing but unchanging being wasting away in a cold cabin on a mountain with winter snows that can trap and suffocate. First and foremost is breaking the tangential thought processes that have suffused his very being ever since his pa had left this mortal plane to run and glide in the aspen forests of the afterlife.
Shayih wonders if his pa is happier on that metaphysical plane where he was told all bats go after they die.
Is that true, he wonders? Is the magics that his pa believed in what all bats everywhere in the world believe in?
The axe goes up and the axe comes down, add another split to the pile and pull a full log from the stack.
His sensitive ears twitch as the sound of the splitting wood echoes across the dead landscape covered in whites and blues. Is that, too, where all the woodland creatures and flowers and trees also go when they, too, inevitably perish? Is the aspen forest of the bats also the afterlife of the cougars that scream out in the night, the owls that hoot, or even the ponderosa pines that stay green until they are eaten alive, catch fire, or die from old age? Do their souls, too, also go to the same place that bats go to after death or do they have a different measure of what's waiting for them?
Do they comprehend death beyond a yawning void that traps and transports souls into something else? All living creatures wish to live to some capacity, even the fungus that makes the ant crawl a stalk to be eaten while the host yet lives. Of the brown recluse that is paralyzed by the wasp who then lays its eggs within the still living host as it, too, gets eaten alive by the wasp's larvae. Even they, too, struggle to survive even though they are a corpse walking, left to rot within life, the essence of rot itself to give rise to a newer generation.
A bell rings out across the snow covered fields of what had been tall wheat stalks several moons ago. Shayih stops and slowly lowers the axe he was holding to chop the wood amidst his mind wandering, his sensitive ears twitching and moving as if... And there, the bell toles once more.
He tilts his head, confused, for it sounds as if the bell sounded both everywhere and nowhere, like it came from the very depths of his soul. Shocked, he grabs at his chest as he feels a strange pulling sensation before the world transforms before him. Where there was nothing but blankets of white covered fields, aspens, pines, and the stars twinkling above the mountain, now there is nothing but black.
As if watching the lightning rip across the clouds before a torrent of hail unleashes itself in the heat of summer nights, a million things flash before his awareness. Things he has never once comprehended or seen before in his young life, knowledge of things and contraptions he has never once imagined could exist before, lifetimes upon lifetimes rip through his mind with blinding force and all the subtly of a large bear. He drops the axe to clutch at his head, the pain overwhelming that it slowly brings him to his knees.
The world around him transforms and what was once a night filled with the colours from the light of the moon and stars become nothing more then bright shimmering outlines, their shapes undulating at both incredible speeds but yet not, set upon a black so soul consuming it feels as if all warmth left in the snow covered world has left for good. He hears the chime of the bell ring out once again. Twice. Three more times. The more the chime sounds out, the worse the migraine is, his whole body is, as if the very blood in his body wished to ooze out of his pores and run red hot into the snows of winter.
And then, suddenly, the wild scream of a cougar sounds out and the world reorientates itself so violently, he's left dizzy and disorientated.
Shayih shakily pushes himself up to his hands and knees just in time to vomit up a thick viscous fluid that stinks of putrid meat and sour decaying berries. The consistency is that of blood, thick chunks interspersed between the fluid that is so thick that it sticks to the sides of his muzzle and throat, refusing to come out. In desperation, he sticks his hands in it to try and pull the viscous fluid out of his throat, to encourage it to move so that he may breathe once more. It only does so much, it is only a fluid filled with loose chunks of unknown matter, but the viscosity is such that he can at least get it travelling. He breathes deeply, coughing and hacking as he does so, once his throat clears away and he can breathe once more.
Tears running from his eyes, he looks down at the putrid vomit he just voided from his stomach before the worst cramps he's ever felt in his gut bring him doubling over, his hair touching the pile of black ichor before him. With great pains, he quickly undoes his belt and gets his pants down just enough before violently expelling something even more foul from his bowels onto the snow ringed mud below him. The smell is overwhelming, a mixture of feces and rotting blood, as if he was shitting out his own rotten intestines. The horrid waste splashes down into the mud, getting onto his pant legs and boots. Tears run silently down his face as the pain rips through his body in waves, each swell bringing with another bout of painful expulsion, until it too becomes exhausted and there exists nothing left in him to void.
He little cares for the horrid disgusting reality of what his body has gone through. Once the last of the cramps fade away and he's left feeling both exhausted and very empty, he carefully lays sideways, in-between both piles of waste, desperately trying to catch his breath from voiding everything from his gastrointestinal tract. He gives a hysterical thought as, well, at least now he knows he's cleansed of everything sitting inside of him before this moment.
As he lays there, he does not catch the waste piles emit dark clouds of smoke into the winter air. What he does notice, however, is when the two piles catch fire. With the most incredulous fearful look he's sure he's ever wore, Shayih crawls as fast as his exhausted body will allow him to away from the two piles of waste that burn with an intensity he's never once seen fires do. He sits up and watches, mesmerized in a morbid way.
Fires don't burn this fast or this hot, especially not for piles of fresh waste still unbelievably wet since they just left his body.
The flames are oddly hypnotic, enough so that he ignores the freezing cold snow that is melting around his still waste stained aft end and exposed balls. They burn in tall sharp towers, the tips of the flames reaching up like the long thing wing bones upon a bat's hand. The flames are quick and devastating, he can feel their almost otherworldly heat from where he sits, the temperature enough to almost bake him alive it feels like.
He has a new appreciation for the loaves of bread he bakes.
And then, as quickly as it happened, it stops. All that remains of what happened, of the unbelievable pain he went through in voiding everything sitting in his stomach and bowels, is nothing more than two charred patches of cracked dirt and the melting of snow around him. Strangely, the fires didn't set the wood pile alight. Fires that intense and that hot care little about something as trivial as a small amount of water and sugar content.
Shayih is shocked back to reality when the cold pain becomes too strong to ignore at his exposed lower end, as if he's feeling a thousand sewing needs all stabbing into his ass and balls. With a groan, he carefully stands up and shuffles his way back into the cabin, using his tail to shield his most sensitive bits from the cold. It's slow and ponderous, he only holds his pants up high enough to not be a hindrance, but once he gets through the cabin's door and collapses onto the tile of the mud room, he lets out a sigh of relief.
He'll just... Lay here for a bit before he gets up and deals with the mess currently sitting between his legs.
Spring cannot come faster.
On this night, several full moons since that incident, Shayih is outside observing the fields that would usually become wheat with a bit of excited melancholy. Today is the first signs of the spring winds that bring with it the change of the mountain, the subtle harbinger for the blooms of life and the start of the planting season for the late spring crops.
However, that wasn't happening today. In fact, no planting would be occurring in these fields and gardens. The usual mixture of perennial grasses and inedible beans would remain where they are, free to grow as much as they wished. There's no use planting crops or preparing fields when there's nobody to tend to them, nobody to watch over and encourage healthy land usage. The ghosts that are tied to this realm can only watch from their view from the windmill for they cannot manage the land from where their souls reside for most of their afterlife. Pa and ma can only watch over this land but they cannot plant or harvest. They cannot can vegetables or fruits, chop wood, repair the cabin, or any multitude of little maintenance projects that require the hands and corporeal body of a living bat.
No, for today he begins preparations to leave behind the cabin and head down the mountain. He's never actually been down from the mountain, his whole life has been this farm and this cabin and this windmill. His friends were the aspens and pines that sit at the edges of the fields, the insects and arachnids that jump, fly or spin their webs in the crops and woods, the rabbits and coyotes he would occasionally catch running or chasing in that deadly game of life and death.
It's an exceptionally daunting task to leave his whole world behind him on the faint hope that he might find someone to give up theirs and join him back here. A faint and almost hopeless task but...
Pa didn't raise a quitter. Life is about movement and moving forward.
And so, with the determination to make something that will chase away the endless chill of a winter alone in the mountain, he gathers up what he expects he'll need for a safe travel down into, what he imagines will be, a thriving town full of other bats like himself, those that find safety and love within the nature that he calls home. A town filled with versions of cabins, the kinds of which he imagined pa detailing to him when he was but a pup listening to stories of people and places he couldn't fathom.
Roads made of materials that don't run off in the summer rains or the dust being blown off the tops by the harsh winds of a home nestled in the clouds. Of flora and fauna he can only guess at how they would appear. Colours and shapes he could not perceive as having existed before but there, before him, is a bloom with star bursts of colour combinations and petal formations that he would have never thought to put into reality but, yet, there it sits nestled in the soil, crying out for pollinators to come along. Of insects and mammals that prowl about the trees and through the meadows, locked in that precarious dance of predator and prey, the kind only seen in the urban environments where many bats sequester together, changing their landscapes with a critical eye.
However, simply thinking and imagining these types of wonders and splendors does nothing for him if he wants to actually experience that which he has never seen, nor touched, nor heard, nor smelled. Staying still, thinking about this pink tinged future does not a future make so long as his paws remain idle.
So, with that in mind, he bustles around his cabin and gathers up materials he believes will be useful to travel down the mountain with. Clothing, bedding, and food items that require little to no preparation before they can be consumed and will last for a long time without cool temperatures. There is also the issue with shelter as well, for even if he has everything he might need caloric wise, that will mean nothing in the face of the relentless force of nature. Mountain weather is already erratic and hard to predict, even if the cabin sits in a valley that has many mild seasons for all that it is nestled close to the heavens.
He remembered as a young pup, pa teaching him the basics of camping... But that was many moon cycles ago now for all that he is 18 winters old. A pup that was just starting to learn his numbers and letters was when pa deemed him fit enough to start the task of self-sufficiency out in the wild. Alas... While the knowledge of knots and packing in a way that maximizes the space he has in his bag has stuck through the years, he's afraid the knowledge of how to build a proper shelter was lost to him.
He knows not to build it in the lowland where the cold air settles at night like a sinister lover waiting for someone unsuspecting to tumble in so that they may freeze the marrow of their lover's bones at night. However, how is he to keep away the cougars he knows prowl the mountains? He imagines his best option would be to build in the trees seeing as he is but a lone bat taking on this journey.
His ears twitch as he hears the chime of a bell ring out behind him, catching his attention just as suddenly as it had all those moons ago deep in Winter. Mustering up his courage, he looks behind himself and is met with the wood that is the cabin walls, tapestries pa said that ma had painted after they had finally got the cabin built gently sway from the fresh spring winds that come in through the open windows, the stillness of an enclosure that has never once been alive outside of the bats that roost within in, but otherwise there is nothing.
There is no reality warping to that of something dark and pulsing. There are no drops in temporal awareness. There are no changes in his physiology or the intense pressure of something wishing to escape his body.
The cabin remains as still as it has ever been since pa had passed and had to be buried underneath the windmill. Perhaps it was a trick of the wind as it ran through the grasses of the meadows, mistaking the whistle of the grass as the chime of a bell.
Shayih returns to packing and planning.
They say all journeys need to start somewhere and Shayih had been neglecting to start his for several weeks now. He had rationalized it as simply waiting for a time into the spring where the volatile mountain elevations wouldn't call upon the clouds to powder the forests in a blanket of snow for weeks now (as it is quite possible for a freak snowstorm to blow into the mountain forests in late spring and early summer).
But the weather had remained mild and suitable for travel, as if the mountain itself was telling him to start travelling and fulfill the promise he had made to himself back in the middle of the winter. That promise to never once suffer the bitter cold alone ever again.
Or as close to an "ever" as he can manage.
He had packed up his travel supplies (sans the food items which still sit in the larder regardless of the fact that they will preserve for many seasons regardless of internal temperature) and they had sat next to the front door of the cabin in wait for the day he would get over himself and finally embark. It's odd, he had been so ready for this journey to happen before that it drove his every action and yet the reality of the fact he could now go had made him tentative about starting. Perhaps this is what pa meant when the old bat had made those jokes to him all those years ago about performance anxiety.
He's still not quite sure what that has to do with regarding a woman but he supposes that it rhymes similar enough to be familiar. Something to ponder about later when he finally gets going down the mountain-!
He takes a deep large breath and, before he can rationalize himself out of it once again (especially seeing as he has not planted anything and the crops that go into the ground early have since passed their planting date), heads out of the cabin and then down into the root cellar to grab that sack of preserved food stuffs without stopping to even think about it. He can't afford to think anymore, not at this junction, or else he'll become even more sentimental about the jars sitting upon the shelves with nobody to come say hello to them.
He's very lonely.
Vitals acquired, he then heads back up and then back to the cabin, not taking any lingering looks out at the land the cabin sits upon for that very same sentimental reason, and beelines straight to the cabin to grab up that pack that has sit next to the door for weeks now, ready and willing to go. Just waiting for him to finally get started on his ultimate goal.
He attaches the food stuffs to his pack and then hikes the whole thing over his back, securing it firmly. It's a bit odd of a feeling to get used to, the strap's light touching upon his wing membranes, but he'll eventually get used to it. The weight, however, is no issue as living his whole life having to tend to the fields has built up years of stamina and muscle regardless of him only being 18 winters old.
Ah... So young, he marvels to himself, to be setting out alone like this with nobody to come home to...
As he locks up the cabin's door (the windows had been locked since the night before he reminds himself), he can't help the tears that fall continuously to the packed earth below his paws. They come and come, the sobs he can barely hold back, as the fact that he's leaving finally sinks in.
There's nobody here but ghosts... But even he can weep about leaving behind his home and the spirits that permeate its walls, its fields, and its buildings. He will come back, he knows and understands this on a level that resides deep in his core, but the act of leaving it all behind to begin with... As if everything will forget that it even existed to begin with, tugs and tears into something inherent to all bats that live in this world.
Or perhaps he is the only selfish one so attached to something filled with naught but spirits.
He takes a moment to wipe away the snot and tears that have marred his muzzle before turning around and taking that first lead filled step away from home. It'll get easier the farther he goes as the wanderlust sets into his bones but right now he wishes for nothing more than to stay here...
Before he pockets his handkerchief, he coughs up a thick black glob of rotten smelling ichor.
He stares at it for a time, emotions a thick mess as it is, and simply pockets the handkerchief away, vowing to contemplate what it all means later.
The bell rings through the trees as they sway upon the leaves and Shayih finds himself finally walking away from the cabin, the fields, and the windmill that stands guardian over it all. Incorporeal as they may be but he feels that the spirits of his pa and ma wave him away onto a successful journey as they wait for him to come back from his journey.
Once he makes those first tentative steps off the property, he finds that he's able to breathe a lot easier, the weight of his decision now a lot less tangible and suffocating the farther away he gets from that place that holds the whole of his soul. In fact, that hope and excitement he felt when he first decided to start making this journey a reality has come back, the effervescent excitement making his steps lighter and his outlook brighter.
As the mid morning sun shines down on him, the warm breeze drifting through the forest and its meadows that surround the fields that usually hold all the wheat, Shayih takes a deep breath and lets go of some of the sorrow that dogs at his heals. One foot in front of the other, the journey now settling firmly into his bones, he thanks the spirits for taking his sadness at leaving their home from within him and releasing it out into the nature that surrounds him.
And what a site he gazes upon as the cabin becomes smaller and smaller behind him.
Oh, there is no path or the like that he is following, all roads that his fields use end at the edge of what was deemed his land, he just has a thick thread that attaches his soul to this place. An anchoring bit of rope that always points back to where he belongs. It tugs and pulls at him as if to remind him that home is underneath this painted image of the distant moon and stars shining in the heavens. They are a beacon that constantly illuminate the way back to the cabin, some innate sense of home and where it resides in space.
Perhaps this isn't unusual to note about, he muses to himself as he finally deigns to look behind him and sees nothing of his cabin or lands, perhaps all bats have this intrinsic ability to know where home is at all times. He likes to think that is the case, that he's not some anomaly amongst what he expects will be his people once he finds them in the valleys below.
It gives him a tentative connection to those distant others he is travelling to meet.
He looks around at the bright vivid colours that have been painted upon the scenery he passes by as he walks. The colours seem to shimmer and glow underneath the sinking sun as the blossoms, grasses, and leaves all sway gently in the winds. Ethereal if he had to put a name to it all, the intensity of the swatches he gazes on, all the work of the guardian that watches over this mountain.
For who else could cultivate a view so intense and breathtaking but that of a god, a spirit so powerful as to shape and mold the earth within its paws?
The aspens' leaves and the pines' needles all a deep green, showing off their health. There exists only mild beetle killed areas in the trees he passes by, most of these old sentinels stand sturdy and proud, proclaiming their dominance of the domain their seeds and shoots will sprout in.
He wonders how old the aspen grove is, the clones of them all must be ancient to be so numerous and hardy. He, too, wonders about the age of the pines, their ancient lineage speaking of a being that deeply understands impoverished times. He marvels at how dense and lively they all are, an unyielding beacon of survival in their own quiet way.
Shayih also takes time to admire the animals that bound and leap in the distance. Bountiful herds full of healthy hinds and their little fawns following after. Perhaps somewhere nearby is the herd for the stags, their antlers shed, as they fatten themselves back up on the plentiful amount of greenery on offer to them before starting the rut all over again in a few short seasons.
The birdsong is clear and rings out through the air in a sweet symphony, nests calling out for food and mates calling out towards others in their flocks. The insects buzz about in their microscopic realities compared to his stature, their world almost incomprehensible to him simply due to being so many magnitudes larger than them. Yet, still, they are governed by all the same laws of nature.
Shayih takes a moment to breathe in the mountain air, fresh and sweet, as he stops in a clearing full of reds, blues, purples, yellows, and whites of the meadow flowers. There is such peace to be found here, regardless of the predators that prowl the forests. All things beautiful and touched by the spirits of the earth and looked down fondly upon by the gods patrolling the heavens. He holds his arms out wide, the membranes of his wings being gently warmed from the last of the sun's rays.
This.
This is what he wants to be able to share with another bat.
Nature and the connection to it. The simple act of knowing that you are but one small whole of something greater and that, while you might feel so insignificant in the world... You are connected to everything in it.
That you matter for simply existing.
He's not somebody who craves much, all his life has been simple wants of connection and love, but is that such a bad thing?
He is nature and nature is himself.
He gives a delighted hum as he spins around a few times before resuming his travels, travelling with a restored vigour.
Several days he has been on this journey through the pines and aspens that line the sides of the mountain that he has called home his whole life. There have been a few mishaps as he learned the way of the wild but he had not forgotten as much as he thought from his puphood.
He remembers the knots that pa had told and drilled into his mind, the ones that can adjust, the ones that will hold weight when hanging from a tree, the ones that will not loosen when they are created, the ones that will not slip and so many more knots that, when he was but a boy, he could scarcely fathom the usage of.
Ah... The simple naivety of youth and yet that seems too harsh a sentence for is he not also quite youthful himself? 18 winters have passed in his life and, to many, that is but the start of his young journey into this vast unfathomable expanse of world. No one bat could ever hope to see everything that there is to see for there is so much space to travel and experience that the journey becomes the life lived.
He has also remembered, through fractures and pieces, of how pa detailed to him how to build a shelter and stay safe during the wild nights. Certainly he has spent many a summer as a young boy outside "camping" in the fields but that was always with pa's watchful eyes over him. That was always with the cabin just a short sprint away. Food was never a worry, neither was safety or love. That was always with the warmth and light of home those summers.
Perhaps he should label those sweet times of summers past as a sort of trial run for what he is doing now on this journey.
Nostalgia aside, he has been able to adequately survive on his own during the ominous days where the sentinels and kings of the forest turn into horrific open expanses of space that do nothing to hide the starving eyes of predators. The pines and aspens that hid him at night do little in the face of the sun at full light and often does he find himself thinking of home when he falls asleep at sunrise and then awakens at sunset.
One thing of note, he has to say, is how much more dull the environments get as he travels down the slope of his mountain home. Greens lose their vibrancy, the birdsong lacks resonance in their notes, the insect's dances have started to become listless, the water which had before tasted sweet and of pure light is now flat and a tasteless cold. Along with a myriad of other small bits and pieces that he cannot adequately describe other than there exists a lack when before there was an abundance.
Whatever that abundance was.
It's enough to make him feel nauseous at odd points during his journey. It's not enough to have him violently expel anything from his person but there were several times he had doubled over in agony with the urge to vomit only for the sharp pain to leave as quickly as it had come.
Perhaps all these instances are connected to that first time back in winter...? He shakes his head as that would be absurd.
He is brought out of his musings as his sharp ears pick up a sound. It is not the insects or night birds that sing, it is not the wind rustling leaves and needles, and it is not the shuffling of his paws upon the forest floor.
No.
It's paws upon the forest floor... but not his paws.
His ears twitch as they swivel and turn to locate that soft scratching disturbance of dirt and detritus that fills the forest before they lock onto that which had caught his attention.
To the left.
He slowly looks in that direction out of the corner of his eye, feigning nonchalance so as to not disturb that which stalks him, and then feels his fur stand on end when he spots the soft glow of orange eyes in the gloom and shadow of the sage brush. the spacing is unnatural and they glow with only just enough light as to be visible in the light of the moon, as if there's a curtain thrown over the eyes that stare through the window at night.
The voyeur that haunts from the door, watching your every move, waiting for the chance to devour.
He can feel his limbs grow cold, the warmth of the summer night giving way to the fearful chill of frostbite. His joints feel like they creak and groan as he tries to keep his composure in the face of that which hunts him.
But it knows that he knows, there is a glint of fangs as it smiles wide and unnatural in his direction. Or perhaps that is his imagination filling in the gaps of the two eyes only faintly visible in the dark.
Shayih weights his options, even though this encounter could be no longer than a few seconds.
His best bet is to assume that whatever predator is stalking him weighs more than he does, even with his supplies in hand, which means getting up into the canopy. From there, it is simple enough to wait out whatever stalks his steps. Once whatever it is gives up on an easy meal, his wing membranes can get him safely back down to the ground.
In these short moments, he feels utter envy for his small wild cousins. Bats that can fly. Oh how simple it would be if only he could lift off the ground and take off like them.
As he's wasting valuable time pondering this predicament, the faint glowing eyes start slowly creeping up upon him. They're much bigger than he expected, their orange glow slowly getting brighter and the odd cant of their spacing and placement more eerie the closer they bob towards his location. Until, in a lightning snap of a decision, the glow comes closer at a rapid pace and there's no room left to think.
It's foolish to turn one's back upon a beast intent to devour but what choice does Shayih have?
Like the animal he actually was, he turned and ran. The signal that the chase was on.
The only advantage he had over that which pursued his steps was agility. The bat used the membranes attached to his arms to give him added jumping ability. It's easier to go over the brush than it is to crash through it. Still, that was only a minor advantage.
It felt like a lifetime but time was but a heartbeat, he found himself quickly scaling up the side of a thick pine trunk and scrambling up the bark and branches of the king of the forest. His claws sank deeply into the bark, he could feel the harsh scrape of it under his paws and the sticky residue pull away from how deep he had to sink them in, his muscles strained as he pulled and pushed himself farther and farther up the tree until...
The canopy.
The moon stood watch as always, impassive to that of all life upon the ground as only one that sits above in the heavens can be. He envies the moon in this moment.
He takes several moments to get his breathing under control before he dares to look back down at the ground to see what it was that wished to devour him. Yet, when he catches a glimpse of it below, it made his blood run cold.
It was a cougar, that much was obvious, but it was no ordinary cougar. It was a massive beast, easily 4 times the size of the regular mountain lions that prowl about the forests looking for prey. Its pelt glimmered with stars, they twinkled as the muscles under the fur flexed as the great beast circled around the thick trunk of the pine he was hiding in. The size of the creature was likely the only thing that had saved him from a swift death as not even the strongest pine could hold such a large creature with its trunk.
It was the eyes, however, that were truly the worst thing. They were bright beacons of orange, their shape completely wrong for the skull they sat in. Large oblong and spaced too far apart on the face, they were like a hare's eyes yet not.
There was also too many of them the longer he stared down at the beast and their pupils seemed to multiply and coalesce at random moments.
It was hard to look at.
The outline of the cougar seemed to be in several locations at once, the forest where it walked being absorbed into it. It both was a physical being and yet... It was like it was also a ghostly figment of his imagination...
It was also nothing at all.
He felt a sharp pain in his stomach as the nausea came back with vengeance. With no time to stop it, Shayih soon found himself expelling the contents of his stomach far down onto the forest floor. It was that same thick viscous rot as he vomited back in the winter, the ichor oozing out of his mouth and nostrils in a suffocating stream. With his free paw that wasn't holding onto the bark of the pine for dear life, he helped pulled the mass out of his maw, his lungs burning as they screamed for air. However, unlike the time back in winter, he was unable to remove his pants before his guts decided to join in the fray and he was left with the nasty humiliating reality of having soiled himself so thoroughly. The stench was unimaginably rotten, like clotted old blood and decaying meat that had been left in the sun to ferment for several days.
A fine night to have what amounts to food poisoning trapped in a tree.
As he stood atop the branch, shaking with the exertion of having violently voided his stomach and bowels, he looked down at the forest floor through tears to see...
A regular cougar circling the tree.
....
Did he imagine the beast from before...?
Shayih's pants were ruined, this much he did know. Even if he were to be able to wash them off in a nearby stream of fresh water, the stench had already been set into the fabrics of the garments and had rendered them unbearable to wear. That and he often recalls pa telling him that no self-respecting bat would ever put up with such offensive odours. Wearing these pants when he finds whatever pocket of civilization fate deigns to bestow upon him at the bottom of the mountain would defeat the whole purpose of this journey.
So, after his tears clear up and his limbs stop shaking worse than an aspen's yellowed leaf about to fall, he shucks off his ruined pants and underwear and lets them fall down to the forest floor.
The soft thump of his discarded trousers startles the cougar that still circles around the pine's base and it rears back with an agitated hiss. It then looks back up at him in what he presumes to be feline agitation before it runs off.
Good, that gives him time to contemplate on the fact that his nether regions feel terrible as the soft breeze of the forest brushes along his dirtied bare ass, let alone his already sweaty cock and balls, the added moisture from his impromptu bout of forced defecation just makes the whole situation that much more unbearable.
He doesn't like being exposed.
As he feels his skin crawl at the overall unpleasantness of this situation, the cougar comes back. He expected no less, honestly, he can easily be a quick meal for the graceful predator. What he does not fathom, though, is that the cougar approaches his trousers, lips curled in disgust, before delicately pulling them away from the base of the pine and then farther off into the brush where he loses sight of it for several moments. In the end, he hears digging. Seeing as he and the cougar are the only creatures in the vicinity, he can only assume it to be the cat.
The cougar then comes back to the pine and starts to scratch at the dirt where his trousers had fallen to.
Had...
Had the cougar buried his soiled pants? What in the world...?
The next several days pass by in a hazy blur as Shayih waits out his tenacious feline stalker. Thankfully he has a fair supply of water in his canteens and enough jerky that perishing from dehydration or starvation isn't too pressing of a worry.
Dying of exposure up in the pine's branches, however, is a constant worry. His blankets and canvas can only shield him from the sun's rays or the moon's cold gaze for so long before his body is unable to compensate for the heat or cold. He is, after all, unable to move to a better location.
He feels a sort of kinship with the caterpillars and butterflies as he imagines himself finally shedding his covers to find a different purpose in life than waiting stationary... But what else can he do in this situation? The cougar waits patiently for him to come down, seemingly just as stubborn as he was.
Shayih gets a dark sense of joy from urinating down to the feline's location but even that disgusting deterrent does nothing to get the predator to leave.
His days go simply like this: awake, check for the cougar, spend several hours dissociating and carefully quenching thirst or hunger when it gets too unbearable, check for the cougar, dissociate more, rinse and repeat. Most of his time is spent sleeping to conserve his energy or staring off at the same bit of canopy that had been his home for the past several moon rises.
He woke up from one of these episode on the fourth moon rise expecting much of the same... Yet, when he checked below for the cougar...
It was gone.
His ears twitched as he focused... But any noise that reaches him was but noises he had heard for several days now. Curious.... His heart races with the implications.
He's then almost startled right out of his perch by an inhuman screech that rends the air asunder followed by the unmistakable begging and crying of a bat being ripped apart... The air is furthered shattered by a loud bang that makes the pine's branches shake with its impact.
The forest falls completely silent afterwards, all sound sucked out of the air.
He decides to stay in the tree one more moonrise.
When next Shayih awakes and checks for the cougar as had become habit, it is still not there. There's no disturbance in the forest floor to suggest it had even come back since that deafening boom cracked the very air he breathes.
The cougar has left.
With shaking limbs stiff and sore from being trapped on a pine's branch for five moonrises, he stuffs his blankets and canvas back into his bag and makes his clumsy way back down to the forest floor. When he knows that he has enough room, he lets go of the thick trunk and spreads his arms, his wing membranes catching the air and allowing him to gently glide down onto the earth.
He fumbles the landing but thankfully doesn't trip.
Filled with anxiety he sets off in search of the stream he's been following along as he heads down the mountain to refill his water and bathe. Then... Then it's resuming his journey.
He wonders where the cougar went...
His journey to the stream is done in a fugue state. He cannot recall what has transpired between his landing on the forest floor and his travel towards the stream bed but here he stands before the burbling fresh water. He observes how it has carved a deep gouge into the rock and dirt and idly ponders how many years that it took to create such a crevasse. If he were to come back here in 10 or 20 years, how much deeper would it be? How wide or narrow would the stream beds be?
Perhaps he will make this same journey back down the mountain when he is an older and wiser bat and have his questions answered. For now, however, he merely regards the water with a distant air.
He goes about washing days of being trapped in the pine off his fury, taking care to wash those areas that pa had always nagged him about growing up. The water is cool and refreshing as he scrapes away caked on filth from his backside and the nastiness that hides within the sheath that hides that most sensitive area on his body.
By the time he steps back out of the stream, the moon's light a gentle glow upon the moisture clinging to his fur, he feels... Alive would be too dramatic of a word but perhaps aware. He is aware once more.
He refills his water stores before taking a few moments to collect himself. The night insects and birds trill about in the background, the breeze blows through the canopy of aspens and pine, and the stars are in full above him.
Despite what he's been through... It is still beautiful.
But it seems dull.... Muted.
He doesn't waste anymore time dissociating once his fur is dry and, with a quick brush, he redresses himself and is once again resuming his travels. He retraces his steps back to the large sentinel he used as a guardian from the cougar and, with a quick study of the stars (and that unique intuition he suspects all bats have), he resumes his travelling in the direction away from his cabin.
The forest is alive with the sounds of night as Shayih travels, nothing untoward makes his ears twitch with danger. The grasses that have clawed out a life down on the forest floor mingles with the detritus of leaves and needles that crunch and squelch under his paws.
Aware of his surroundings but not the time, soon enough, he finds dawn creeping up on him once again... Much like it would do before he got treed by a cougar.
Amazing how life, even an existence as nomadic as his currently is, can return to normalcy.
He's in the middle of finding a suitable location to sleep for the day when an odd smell wafts into his notice. It is both the sweet scent of rot and... Something indescribable... It reminds him of what he imagines the stars would taste like as they shimmer in the sky. Perhaps it's stupid to follow it but something about the stench calls to him on a deep and primal level.
As he pushes away brush and checks the overgrown grasses in his search, there...
He finds where it's coming from.
And his earlier question of where the cougar went is answered.
He steps up to a scene of death, of a hunter getting caught within the jaws of another hunter. Before him lays the corpse of the cougar, shoulder and jaws blown out by the force of buckshot at point blank. It's a grisly scene, the face of the feline missing its upper half, exposed tongue bloated and brain matter splattered about where it fell. Were it not for that, the pelt would have been in good condition. The weapon that killed it sits discarded by the remains of the mouth of the beast.
Before the cougar lies another bat. The unfortunate soul having a shredded leg and clear bite wounds on the torso.
Shayih moves to get a closer look for he's never actually encountered another bat that wasn't either himself or his pa. As he pears down at the eyes, pupils blown wide and milky with death all too soon to be deflated as the forest consumes them, he guesses that he's looking at another man. He tilts his head curiously as he observes the form. The corpse looked fairly healthy, with good muscle mass and clean intact wings. No signs of white on the ears or nose, showing that they were free from the most nightmarish of diseases.
He leans down and begins removing the corpse's clothing, rifling through the pockets for more information or useful items. The bat is dead, it would go to waste otherwise. Sadly, his search brings up nothing.
He decides to keep the clothing, however, and stores it in his pack.
Now he looks down at the naked dead man at his paws and is overcome with a strange desire. He picks up the arms, notes their weight and flexibility... How cold they are in death, and watches as they flop uselessly down to the ground. He does it again with the legs and tail, rolling the dead man over onto the stomach and watches as congealed blood and other internal fluid moves about under the fur. Some even oozes out of the open wounds, chunks of blood and puss drain a little, the viscosity slowing the trickle.
The smell is horrendous.
He tilts his head again and lifts the dead man's tail out of the way and observes the man's anus. He feels the dead man's balls and sticks his claws into the cold slimy entrance of his sheath.
He is hard.
The man is dead.
He doesn't know what comes over him but he unbuckles his pants and rubs himself onto the man's back end, smearing the dead man's fur with his own fluids. He pets at the dead man's fur, fondling the cold lifeless globes of the man's ass before he parts them. He observes the reality of the man's loss of muscle control as feces can clearly be seen at the dead man's entrance.
With great reluctance, he foregoes his idea of sticking himself into the dead man's anus and instead awkwardly moves around the corpse so that he could open the corpse's maw and stick himself in it.
It's cold and slightly slimy towards the back of the throat but it serves his purposes just fine. He holds the dead man's head and muzzle as he rocks himself into the corpse's mouth. Soon enough his own fluids start to coat the inside of the dead man's mouth and what once was slightly slimy was now something with an easy glide.
The temperature goes from cold to lukewarm as he fucks himself with the corpse's face. He groans as the feeling in his belly tightens and his movements get erratic. He pauses for only a moment to catch his breath and swallow back the saliva that had pooled in his mouth before he's moving again, handling the dead man's head with a sort of violence.
And then a snap.
Shayih groans loudly as he empties himself into the dead man's throat, hips twitching as he rides out the waves of his release.
The man is dead.
Once awareness returns to him, he removes himself from the corpse's mouth before moving to grab a cloth from his pack to clean himself. That done, he returns to looking down at the dead man and feels another compulsion overcome him.
Lifting up the corpse's arm that was closest to him, he observes the muscles and fur for several moments. He supposes that this man would be considered attractive if he were alive...
His fangs bite down into the dead man's flesh and tears out a chunk of meat soon to rot. The meat tingles on his tongue and the taste is indescribably bitter yet sweet, as if he is biting into a too ripe apple straight to the core. The thick viscous blood that had chunks that had since congealed coats his tongue and offers a distinctly unpleasant texture that almost makes him want to gag.
He's ravenous.
He consumes the dead man's flesh down to the very bones of the man's arm before he rips that out and cracks it open to suck out the marrow, almost as if he is possessed by something to eat every scrap of the corpse he can. He gnaws on the bone he has just sucked dry as he observes the unmoving corpse below him.
He's hard again.
Hmm...
After his quite intimate session with the dead man, Shayih picks up his journey down the mountain once more. He is content to write off his brush with necrophilia and cannibalism as simply a disturbing compulsion brought about by prolonged loneliness. The craving of company would drive any bat to measures that they would not normal partake in should they be of sturdy mind.
His travel down the mountain holds no other interesting tidbits.
There are no other encounters with cougars or other predators that wish to devour him nor does he encounter any other bats as he travels. If anything, nature regales him with her splendor but keeps her admiration distant. He hears the birds and insects, the distant bugling of the elk as they fight for mates, the changing of the aspen's leaves... The wind rustling the leaves and needles and brush...
But nothing more and nothing less.
In fact, nature seems to be taking away her beauty from him as all of his senses and experiences of the world dull the longer he travels.
What once was a beautiful forest that twinkled and shimmered under the moonlight, that glowed during dawn and dusk, now... It is merely bouncing light, hardly anything to marvel at. The air lacks that sweet fresh taste, the smell of the life existing around him has less life in it... Even his own excrement and urine don't smell as strongly even when accounting for the times he consumes meat. The birds and insect's songs have been flattened into one bar, lacking the diversity of differing sound channels.
It's depressing, this lack of richness in his surroundings.
It makes him feel just as cold as he did back during winter.
Soon enough, he stops admiring that which means so much to him as the magic of the mountain vanishes as he stumbles upon a well travelled road. Where once there was still the shimmer of nature sitting at the corners of his eyes, a small embrace from the mother of everything, it was now gone.
He feels bereft of... Something. Like he just had something taken from him and put into a place he can still see and know exists but it's... Simply out of his reach. He feels the compulsion to go back into the forest, to go back up the mountain, to go back to his cabin...
But he'd just have to make this journey again next year. It's best to keep on...
Still, he weeps at the indescribably loss he feels in his very soul, almost as piercing as the sheer agony of the day he lost and buried pa.
Soon he is beset by that very familiar bit of nausea but he manages to swallow it down. His guts churn violently, threatening to make him mess himself for the third time for this type of episode but nothing comes of it other than cramps and discomfort. The event passes and, while he still feels the cold sting of sadness sitting within his breast, he carries on and hops up onto the dirt road, travelling down it.
He... Hates how it feels under his paws, like the dirt is somehow not a part of nature. As if it is wrong in some way. He endures, however. He's come too far to be bested by how irritating he finds the pebbles that line the road.
He goes into the dissociative state that has become so familiar to him in his journey as he travels at a steady pace.
It is when the sun is peaking up over the horizon that a sign off the side of the road catches his attention. He stops to observe it but squints in confusion at the strange symbols he sees written on them. They look like nothing like the letters of which pa taught him with, they are too... Flat and concrete. Boring and lifeless. He sneers at them.
He is coming to find that he does not particularly like the writing of the bats at the bottom of his mountain. It's a little petty but he can't help it.
Regardless, he follows the arrow that points in the direction he was heading and can only hope that it leads to a town at this point. It probably does, or at least some form of dwelling if it was written about.
And so he pushes forward, heaving a great put upon sigh. He had the naive thought that he would come down the mountain and be straight in the middle of a town. What foolish wishful thinking.
Oddly he does not feel tired as the sun crests the horizon and bathes the world in golden light. He simply pulls his hat down lower over his head to shield his eyes from the intense glare. The sun rays warm his fur and chase away the cool warmth of the moon until he debates storing his clothing away as the soothing warmth soon turns miserably hot.
Honestly...
He stops and strips bare, storing his clothing in his pack. He has never been ashamed of his nakedness but pa told him that bats at large find it polite to hide their cock and balls. He then asked if all bats had those and pa just laughed at him. He was only a pup... but pa never did tell him, so who knows what the truth is.
He walks and walks down the boring dull road, sipping on water when he gets too hot and even napping in the shade of a grove of aspens when the sun hits the apex of the sky. He truly despises this leg of his journey, everything is so unbelievably dull and lifeless to his senses. He even touches himself, frantically working himself up with rapid strokes and splatters a pine trunk with his essence but not even that alleviates the dull empty feeling that this road and surrounding forest gives him.
Ugh...
Shayih huffs in abject frustration, wishing to... Wishing to-!
What does he wish to do...?
He stares off into the distance but no answer comes to him. Just a yawning cavern inside of him that gnaws on his soul to fill it. It's like a loneliness but not the kind he is intimate with. There's nothing but the lifelessness of the world around him.
He travels down the road.
It's as the sun finally sets and the first few stars blink in the dull sky that he spots it. Dwellings, off in the distance! Finally!
He's just about to run when he hears pa's chiding voice in his head telling him to, "Put his damn pants on, boy, no polite person wants to see your goods."
He quickly dresses himself before jogging to the densely packed buildings. Finally! Finally, his journey is at an end!
Now to find somebody that wishes to leave this dull lifeless place for the quite peace and beauty of his cabin up in the mountains. It shouldn't be that hard, right?
Right.
After all, who in their right mind would want to continue living in a place so devoid of life?
CONTENT WARNING: Urine, dubcon, noncon, necrophilia, necrophagia
The Beginning - 3
The beginning 3 - I know you, your veins fall to parched soil
Shayih has been a wanderer, a passive observer of this place that pa has described as civilization. He has seen the bats, people that resemble him and speak his language and dress in clothing similar to the ones that he adorns his body with, seen the people go about their lives as they walk to a fro from place to place... Yet never once lifting their heads to observe the life that happens around them.
He hates them. He'd go so far as to say that he detests these people and their ways of life. Of their vapid empty existence devoid of connection, nuance, and nature. Everywhere in this town packed full of stone buildings that choke the skies with their chimneys that belch out smog. He sees the streets that are covered in stones, the walls in plaster, the sky in a thick haze that seems impenetrable...
It limits existence. It forces that which is beautiful and vast into something so minuscule and utterly meaningless. There is nothing else to these people but the stones under their paws. They do not care for the world around them for they do not even notice it. Their existence compressed into a footnote of the world. It is suffocating being so closed off from the natural.
Outside the town's walls he can breathe and, subsequently, he feels his place in the world. Inside the walls he is but something meaningless, slave to the dredging of what these bats consider living. So often does he see bats and pups fall prey to neurosis in even his short time here because they put all of their focus on that which is made by paw only.
Art should be an expression of love and life but, instead, the artworks he observes in this inescapable malaise of soul destroying stone do not touch the heart that lies deep in his chest. They speak of only petty problems, of petty connections, of petty wants.
He finds great umbrage with the artworks that depict a bat that is larger than life with a face that sells mercy.
There is no mercy in those soulful carvings of eyes for Shayih can feel the chisel marks of the malice the sculptor imbued upon this figure of love. He hates the film of hatred and greed that lay upon the marble of a figure that holds such soft natural light within it. The film of the filth that lays upon the carved stone rots away at the light of both the physical stone and the metaphysical connection to the spirit that embodies the sculpture of the bat.
He does not see what pa said, that all bats hold love as paramount to existence. All of these bats hold little light within them. He cannot see the love in their cores when there is so much rot and filth that sits nestled deep into their sinew and fur.
At first it was not like this.
Shayih had come into this town with great love. It was so novel to see other bats! Everyone around him was beautiful. From the tallest man, to the biggest woman, and down to the innocent cuteness of the pups. He loved everything he saw. He loved the beauty of what bats could make with their hands, the marvels of engineering and the power that fire held when put to work powering these hulking beasts of metal. He liked the smells of the place, the smells of bats as they sweated and toiled, of the loving gentle baking of bread or the complex marination of a roast on the spit, even the refuse that piled in the alleyways. He loved everything he encountered, truly, he had never felt such love in his life outside of pa... The love of family, no matter how distant. Several days he wandered, taking shelter amongst his friends in the alleyways, travelers and vagabonds alike, unaware of the growing sense that something was off.
But, like all things, slowly that novelty wore away and the rot became noticeable. He saw it dripping and oozing off the fur of the elderly, sitting like fungus upon the fur of the adults, and the spores waiting to take root on the pups.
He saw that the stars and the moon were hidden away behind the blanket of progress and that was when the rest of the light faded away.
He starts to see the first cracks in the facade, the plaster fading away, and he saw that which was hidden under the patch. He saw that everything was... Simply fake. Conversations were fake. The buildings and creations were fake. The food was fake. Even the artwork, the last sign of what makes bats so unique, was fake.
There was nothing behind the facade once it crumbled to dust and he was left empty.
Shayih was taking shelter in an alleyway that stunk of feces, urine, and other rotted detritus along with the other vagabonds of this particular town. He doesn't mind the company of the dirt covered bats he sleeps next to, hearing their moans of distress or pleasure echo down the stones, nor their odoriferous bodies for they are the most real things existing in this village of empty promises.
He has made friends here in the dirt and grime of those forgotten by the rest of society. They are bitter, their bodies worn by a hard life of living on the streets, yet they are the soul of this town.
He watches as a woman that is barely a winter older then himself, her face and body so much older from the stress of existence, pull up her skirts and expose her sex to the man that had handed money over to her. Usually he would watch her take a man's rod into her maw but apparently this client is paying quite handsomely to be able to take her so intimately.
He thinks the man is ugly.
The other bat is a sneering fellow, much too clean to ever fit in here. He watches the other man pull out his prick, watches as it leaks already from the head. Shayih doesn't understand the excitement of it all, this woman seems completely removed from everything, the light in her eyes gone as she puts on a mask to perform.
And then in one swift thrust, the man is buried in the woman. Shayih watches her wince in pain at the same time that he hears the man moan in delight. He watches and feels disgust at what he sees in this man as the bat sloppily thrusts into a woman with a blank look upon her face. All too soon it is over with a grunt from the fellow.
Short, meaningless. He doesn't like it for the woman should have been delighted as well but she was not. She doesn't even look like she was there.
He watches the man pull out, his member wet and spent as fluid sticks to the inner thighs of the woman's fur, the tackiness of it that he observes looking uncomfortable.
Then the man hits the woman in the head hard enough to get her to pass out onto the filthy streets below her paws before bending down and reaching back into her skirt's pockets.
Shayih tilts his head as he watches. Does this ugly man suffer the cravings that he does as well? Does the bat before him hunger for the flesh of another bat? Does he wish to taste the fetid coagulated blood pool in his mouth as he bites deeply into the muscles of his meal?
It's quiet, not even the sounds of the rats scurrying through the unnatural stones echo down the alleyway. Still, the man stands there, member still out and drying in the fetid breeze that blows down this place.
Shayih watches the man stand back up before he urinates on the unconscious woman, the sound of it loud to his sensitive ears which twitch at ever drop of the stream soaks into the woman's clothing.
What an ugly man.
He watches impassively as the man puts himself away and finally begins to walk away from the woman. He knows not where this man in the clean clothing is going but it matters not. One moment he was standing there and watching the play of sex only for the enjoyment of the man and the next moment he was sinking his fangs into the soft spaces between the muscles of the bat's neck.
He moans in delight as fresh blood fills his mouth from the punctured artery, causing him to involuntarily rut into the backside of the too clean man, feeling as the gushing blood spills out from between his teeth and flows down his jaws, soaking the man's shirt.
He thinks now the man is beautiful, as the body gives into death and allows for the wonder of rot to set in.
Soon the man dies in his arms and he slowly lowers the other bat down to the stones in the alleyway. He wants...
But first, he sticks his hands in the man's pockets and pulls out both the money the man payed the woman but also for more where more money was stored. He looks impassively at the black and white photos of different bats in the billfold, the faces caught in time of an unnamed woman and several pups.
They mean nothing here.
He doesn't think the woman has need for the man's ephemera anyway. He takes all of the man's money out of the useless billfold and goes back to the unconscious woman. Although her clothing is soaked in the ugly man's urine, he still places the money into her pockets. She is owed more than this, he feels, for the audacity of the man she sold her body to.
He then returns to the man and methodically takes off the too clean clothes for this place and tosses them aside. He has no use for them... But, perhaps, one of the many vagabonds in the alleys would find the discarded clothing useful. The scraps would make for good patches for the textiles are made of quality thread, among many other uses. He now stares down at the naked dead man before him for several moments before he begins massaging the globes of the man's aft end, his paws rough as they push around the muscles under his palms.
Perhaps it's petty.
He pops the button on his trousers and pulls them down just enough to reveal his sheath, the head of his prick already beginning to emerge and engorge from the excitement of this act. He watches as the fascination and anticipation of what he is about to do has his blood travelling south as more of his shaft exits.
Perhaps he feels it is a type of justice as he dips a finger into the dead man's hole, the body still pliant and warm from so fresh a death, while taking himself in hand, stroking with languid movements for he wants to savor this moment of anticipation before he pushes himself into that waiting but cooling heat. He spreads the fluid that beads at the head of his cock as he strokes himself, letting out a soft moan of pleasure as he does so. He feels thick viscous drool pool in his mouth and when it drops down onto the fur of the dead bat's ass, it is blacker than the Nothing that awaits everyone.
And with little care, he buries himself into the dead man's ass in one brutal thrust. Something deep in his soul purrs with the satisfaction of this copulation with death.
Shayih has decided to take the dead man's corpse back to the place he sleeps in at night, a little hideaway in a building long left abandoned. The facade of the building is cracked, the plaster falling away and the stones chipping and crumbling into dust. The beams are rotting and the floors inside the house are collapsing, yet the cellar remains safe and structurally sound what with being built of stone. He has set it in a corner of the cellar, across from where he keeps his pack and his makeshift bed, and watches the meat ferment enough until it is sufficiently rotted for his palate.
During the days of waiting, he takes out his lonely frustrations using the body as a makeshift masturbator, his satisfaction growing as the meat rots further everyday. After all, it is only right that he takes as much as he can from the ugly man's body.
He feasts the night when the smell of the rotted corpse signals that it is ready, greedily biting into predigested muscle and organs as the natural detritus eaters in every bat's body eats the man from the inside out. Ironic now that Shayih is the one eating the man from the outside in.
He feels overfull and lazy as he consumes the corpse over several days, the zing and tingling sensation making him feel hot. Too often he finds himself having to take himself in hand and furiously stroke himself until he sees spots in his vision and splatters the dirt floor of the cellar with his seed in the middle of eating.
Until, eventually, only bones remain of the dead man's corpse.
He knows those bones will not be found for many years, not until the house crumbles down around them. He cares little about the lonely fate that is the ugly man.
However, he feels like he has wasted enough time wandering aimlessly around a place that has no soul in it. He has not found another bat that will make the winters bearable. Yet he can't return back to his cabin for he is in the middle of the planting season and by the time he gets home, he will not be able to plant the life sustaining grains and vegetables he needs to weather the winter.
He needs to find a new town.
He needs a few days to work off the meal of eating the ugly man.
He settles down into a nap.
Shayih wakes up some time later when the moonlight that manages to shine into the dirty cellar windows is slowly giving way to the sun's rays. Truthfully he has slept more than enough for now and decides to take a few more wanders around this town before he gathers his things and travels down the road to the next settlement.
His ears twitch as he hears loud deep moaning next to the entrance to his little cellar hideout. Curiously, he heads to the hidden hole that leads to the world outside and watches a handsome man leaning onto the crumbling plaster of the forgotten house and relieve his bladder into the dirty stones at his paws. Oddly, the man appears as if his is grabbing into the walls.
Curious.
He is fascinated by this handsome man, feeling an odd connection to the other bat as he watches the man piss for what feels like a very long time, the puddle at his paws growing and growing... How much urine could this man hold in his body? It's with these thoughts that he climbs out of the hole and quietly walks up behind the urinating bat.
He wonders if he has ever drunk as much as this man apparently has.
"How much did you imbibe?" he asks the handsome bent over man.
They both startle for different reasons. Sahyih for he has forgotten what his voice sounded like after having refrained from using it for so long and the handsome man for simply being caught off guard.
The handsome man tries to whirl around and catch him him across the face with claws but stumbles and slips a bit in his own urine puddle. A few final drops of piss land on Shayih's paws. It's warm.
"The fuck-?!" the handsome man says, voice slurring some, "Were you just watching?!"
"Yes," he answers because why lie? He was watching the other man urinate.
The handsome man merely looks at him with hazy incredulity. Shayih finally realizes that he might be drunk.
"You know what? I can at least appreciate that you're so earnest in being a total fucking creep," the other bat says, only slightly slurring the words, "I've certainly heard and been involved with worse..."
Shayih watches the other bat trail off, looking off into the distance as memories flow through the handsome stranger's mind, eyes glazing over as the memories demand all of the man's attention.
He tilts his head as he observes the other bat, taking in the man's appearance. The other bat is a dichotomy, he thinks, when he sees him up close. From afar, the man looked to be well dressed, clothed in a suit that seemed fitted and of good fabric... But it was just a facade. Up close the sleeves and pants are a bit worn, threads hanging out as the stitching becomes loose, pants slightly frayed, and knees covered in dust. The man's fur is also a bit oily and not as well groomed as he supposes it could be.
Shayih cannot say anything for he has no regular access to water for which to wash himself. It is a conundrum that vexes him every morning and night as he more often than not must go to bed covered in the day's grime. He hates that he is filthy but... Remaining here in civilization to find a companion comes with many sacrifices, unfortunately.
The man still seems lost in thought so it must be a lot of memories the other bat must sift through.
He looks down and observes the man's sheath and the tip of the other bat's cock peeking out shamelessly. It's nice, he thinks, and he wonders how big it actually is once it is fully engorged. He can smell it, a sharp tang that sits at the back of his throat and...
"You are diseased," Shayih says as he looks back up at the handsome bat's face, "There is rot sitting within your sheath. It smells strong and tangy... Like a berry that's not quite ripe, the bite of bitterness and sour that sticks to the back of your throat."
That snaps the other man's attention back onto him.
"Were you seriously checking out what I had between my legs...?" the other man chooses instead to focus on. Shayih thinks this is rather silly, he would think that the other bat would instead thank him for pointing out that such a sensitive organ is currently festering with rot. Oddly, he feels angry about this... But he's not sure why.
This place makes him feel a lot of anger, if he's honest. He doesn't like it.
"Yes," he answers the other man's question regardless, "It is currently exposed like any other portion of yourself covered in fur. I suppose it would be more inconvenient to simply piss your pants but it would prevent you from exposing that bit of your anatomy to the masses. Besides, you have yet to hide it behind your trousers once again, I can only assume that means that you are fine with showing it to me."
The other bat opens and closes his mouth a few times before he sighs and runs a hand through his hair and then scratching behind an ear that Shayih thinks twitches cutely from embarrassment.
"You have to either be the most honest guy out there... Or just the weirdest I've ever met," the other bat mumbles, "Usually I wouldn't even think of entertaining freaks like yourself but whatever... Maybe if I suck your dick really well than you won't kill me or something insane like that...?"
The handsome man then trails off, mumbling to himself while Shayih stands there and feels quite insulted by that accusation, actually.
"I have had many opportunities to kill you," he points out to the other bat, "You are obviously inebriated and did not hear me come up behind you. You got lost in thought and lost focus of the world around you, and still here, you stand before me mumbling to yourself about me, very clearly ignoring me, and yet... You still draw breath. Curious. It is as if I am not going to harm you and have no interest in doing so. However, if you keep saying I will than I might have to take that as a challenge."
It is quiet between them for a time before the other bat lets out a loud bark of laughter, the sound almost hysterical. He watches the other man bend over and clutch his knees to remain standing upright as his mirth continues.
Shayih doesn't understand and this man is annoying him now, handsome face or not.
"By the high moon," the other man eventually wheezes out, "You're just a riot!"
Shayih jumps as the other man places a paw on his shoulder. Oddly, it didn't register until now that the handsome drunk bat before him is shorter than he is.
"I think that deserves a reward and... Let's just say that you somehow charmed me," the other bat says, "In all your weird creepy glory. How's about I actually suck that dick of yours?"
Shayih blinks at the other man in confusion, pure and innocent.
"Why would you want to put my penis into your mouth?" he asks, "Curiosity? It is quite unwashed at the moment, clean streams are hard to come by in this labyrinth of dust and stone."
The handsome bat simply stares at him and stares at him... He thinks he hears a far off night bird call in the interim. He clicks his claws together as he starts to hunch down into himself as the awkwardness really settles in around their shoulders, a heavy burdensome weight. Shayih was... Unaware that prolonged talking to another person could be so perilous.
"You're joking, right?" the other bat finally asks, "You're telling me that nobody has even talked to you about the wonders of getting your dick sucked...?"
Shayih did put his cock into that corpse's mouth several full moons ago but that was merely a cold wet hole that only responded through his own stimulus. Does having active suction change the experience...?
"Well... I have lived alone through the past winter... But before that I lived with my pa up the mountain," Shayih says a bit slowly, voice uncertain and dragging, "Just myself in the cabin on the farm, watching the wheat in the breeze and the bugs call in the garden..."
"So what you're telling me is that you're a total hermit and virgin," the handsome man says to him.
"No, not a virgin," Shayih explains, "I have had relations before."
The handsome man just stares at him with an incredulous expression. Is it possible to tell a person's sexual experience by looking at them, he wonders? If so, then this man must know about Shayih's predilections for the flesh of the dead.
"I find that hard to believe, frankly. There has to be some weirdo out there that wants a piece of your crazy ass."
Or maybe not. Maybe the other bat just thinks him a liar for some reason that he cannot fathom. The people here are so married to that sensation of deception, after all, he's not sure why he thought otherwise.
"I suppose you would find my previous sexual exploits to be hard to believe... But, then again, you are intoxicated so your current mental faculties are not what they should be," Shayih snarked back, "And for the last time, I am of sound mind!"
The other bat just stared at him after his outburst in a bit of a daze. Shayih will not apologize for being frustrated at the other man's baseless accusations.
"You have such a baby face and yet talk like some old man, it's totally strange."
"I am not a child, I am 18 winters old."
"Baby," the handsome man whispered, "I'm talking to an actual baby..."
"Man! I am a man!"
"You're barely out of school, you lunatic!"
"I am a man and I'm not crazed, you imbecile! How many times do I have to remind you before your drunken mind stops spilling out of your cute ears?!"
Shayih huffs in indignation as he glares down at the other bat.
And stares and stares, the silence thick, until...
"You still haven't put your cock away," he informs the other man in a dry tone.
The handsome man looks down at his flaccid dick as it rests in his sheath, poking out from the top of the man's trousers. He scratches at the pubic fur that sits above it in a contemplative fashion.
"I mean... I could put it away... But I did say I'd suck your dick," the handsome man mumbles to himself, "But I doubt I could get it up anyway so why bother."
The handsome man finally does his trousers up and Shayih gives a private thought to the loss of it. Maybe he shouldn't have said anything and let the handsome man keep it out. He doesn't, however, look away at any point and the other man seems to notice, exaggerating the motions of putting such a sensitive bit of anatomy behind clothing once more.
"Oi, if you're going to fuck me with your eyes, you should at least know my name," the handsome bat says, voice dancing with a soft laugh, "Afkadar."
There's a jolt deep in his soul as he hears a bell ring out through the night. Shayih likes that name... It feels correct, like something slotting into place within him. A name has power and control, he knows this, and this one brings about such a strong binding of power that its like thick spider silk cocooning around both himself and the man before him.
"I like your name," he says in a bit of wonder, "I'm Shayih."
They are bonded and he gives his name freely to the man that will be his partner. There exists truth in their connection, safety, it is only right to share it for he was trusted with the other man, with Afkadar's, name.
It's quiet between them as Afkadar, stares up at him, expression going incredulous.
"Your name is 'Thing'...?" the now named Afkadar asks him, voice dripping in condescension, "Seriously? Thing. Some person out there named their child, 'Thing.' I'm not sure if I should feel sorry for you or praise your father for naming you something derogatorily unique."
Shayih stares at him in confusion.
"I don't know why my name is so wrong to you. That is not my name, my name is Shayih."
"Yeah. Thing."
"Shayih."
"Thing."
Shayih is starting to get annoyed with the other man again... Why was Afkadar getting his name so wrong? The other bat knew his name and yet refuses to say it? He doesn't get it.
Afkadar heaves a great sigh and sways a bit on his paws as he runs claws through his hair in frustration. "Look, can we just... Go somewhere that doesn't stink of my piss so that I can suck your dick for you...?"
"I like the smell of urine."
"Of course you would, you creep..."
"Just come down the hole."
There is a pause.
"What fucking hole?!"
"The hole in the plaster of the wall of the house. It's quite large, I don't get how you can't possibly see it, I'm looking right up at you."
A longer and more poignant pause.
"There is no fucking hole, you creepy fuck! I watched you slither through the literal wall and here you are telling me that you're looking up at me?! Stupid ass fucking ghost-"
"That's hurtful, Afkadar, you clearly touched me so clearly I am fully corporeal."
"I don't care if it hurt you, it's the truth! How else do you explain yourself phasing through literal stone?!"
One more pause.
"Because it is a hole. The mechanics of you going into the hole are quite simple."
"I'll go into your hole-"
"That is not the point nor is this a place to be crude."
"I am literally here to suck your dick, I think I've earned my place to be as crude as I want to be. In fact, I don't even think I'm actually talking to another living bat in this moment seeing as I just saw you disappear into the ruins of this old house that has sat crumbled into nothing for as long as I can remember, and let me tell you, it's been featured in legends of the area since even my great grandmother's time-"
Shayih tunes out the increasingly manic ramblings of the bat standing at the threshold of the hole that leads into the abandoned basement of this old house. He has no idea what the other man is talking about, there is clearly a house here that has a basement and upper levels. No, they are not sturdy, but they are clearly here for he is very clearly here.
"-And by that measure, how do I know that I'm talking to an actual person in this instant and this isn't some drunken hallucination my mind has conjured up. Can drunkenness even conjure up as vivid of a hallucination as you? It's certainly never happened to me-"
Shayih gets tired of listening to Afkadar blow smoke and grabs the man's ankles, pulling the other bad down through the very clear hole in the wall that leads down to the basement of this abandoned house.
Afkadar's screech hurts his sensitive ears, forcing him to pull them back against his head.
There's a glowing shimmer as he pulls the other bat down into the basement with him and a sickening pop as Afkadar lands in an ungraceful heap upon the dirt floor of the basement. The other man heaves for breath as if he is suffocating, writhing around on the floor of the basement as if in immense amounts of pain. The man is in so much agony that his screeches of pain come out as noiseless wheezes as the force of his yelling is too high pitched to even register as a noise.
Shayih watches this with a mild amount of fascination.
Eventually the other bat tires himself out he falls limp and gasping upon the dirt. Shayih crouches down to observe Afkadar up close and the other bat look up with him with such pure malice that it distorts his handsome features into something grotesque. Gums visible, eyes so wide that they flare under the moonlight coming through the foggy basement windows, jaw clenched tight that veins can be seen bulging from the strain and brows drawn down so tightly that they almost touch in rage.
Then it is gone. The other bat is now breathing normally and sitting up as if he has never once experienced the pain that he displayed so earnestly mere seconds before.
Fascinating.
"Well," Afkadar mumbles as he sits up and wipes his paws down the front of his suit jacket, "That was uniquely awful and I hate you so much for it right now."
Shayih stares at the other man for a long time before shrugging off the other man's accusations. Sure, the hate was justified at the time, but the time has passed. "There is no need for resentment for an event that you walked away from intact," he helpfully points out.
The other bat doesn't seem to think it was very helpful going by the look of naked rage that was overtaking Afkadar's handsome muzzle. It was really quite striking, he thinks, before he watches it deflate like a puffball mushroom before him, the rage leaking from the other bat's face like the aforementioned mushroom's spores.
Is that how hate propagates through a community, Shayih wonders, little spores that explode from the host and then embed themselves into the fur and flesh of other bats?
"You know what? I don't even have it in me anymore to actually care," Afkadar breaks the silence (and Shayih disagrees, he thinks the other bat can care so much more), "So get your ass in front of me so I can make one last really terrible decision by putting your crazy weirdo ghost dick into my mouth."
Shayih stares at the other bat for a long moment before he tentatively moves over to where the other man is resting on his knees. That can't be comfortable, he thinks, to be in the dirt like that. Knees don't have much padding... Perhaps it would be be a kindness if he were to grab something for Afkadar to kneel on? He is about to offer to do so before the other man unceremoniously opens up the laces on his trousers and exposes his sheath to the cold damp air of the abandoned cellar. He starts to feel a little uncomfortable the longer that Afkadar stares at one of the most sensitive places on his body.
"Er..."
"No, shut up."
Shayih immediately clams up from the forceful commanding tone of the other man. Pa used to use such tones on him often when he was being naughty as a pup.
"I'm going to say this right now, you smell absolutely disgusting. It's like a combination of burning rubber, fetid water, and cheese that's actively being eaten by maggots. I should know, I stole some of that cheese from some rich nobody's place, they call it a delicacy but I'll be honest, it just smells vile."
How rude. Sure, he can't groom and wash himself as effectively here but he doubts that his dick smells like some rotting delicacy of a cheese.
...Right?
"And I don't think I've ever seen somebody with that much of a bush on them, it's no wonder you like the smell of urine considering what I'm looking at."
He was unaware that he had foliage in his trousers.
Unless the other man was talking about his pubic fur? Isn't it supposed to be this length? He can't help it that it catches urine, that's just the nature of where it grows.
...Was he supposed to alter the length of it...?
"But whatever... I've got myself this far into this whole mess. Sober me is going to hate this when he gets his memories back."
Shayih thinks Afkadar is speaking quite coherently so he highly doubts the other man will have issues recalling these events. The other bat seems remarkably sober and lucid in this moment.
If that's the case, why is the other man telling him such rude things...?
All further thought is halted as he feels Afkadar paw at him. It's... A weird vulnerable feeling, to have another bat's paws on himself, it is also very embarrassing because now he is self-conscious about if the other man likes how he feels, likes his cock, likes the weight of him in the other man's paw... Does the other man even want to touch him in this manner after complaining about how unhygienic Shayih is...? He's so caught up in these insecure thoughts and fears that he doesn't notice Akfakar getting more and more frustrated until it's too late. The look on the other bat's muzzle... It makes him feel bad. Bad in a way that he can't quite describe. He gently pushes the other bat's paw away from his cock and takes a step back, awkwardly covering himself up. He was still flaccid. The other man was very handsome but was unable to coax anything from him.
Aren't mates supposed to love one another...?
Afkadar looks at him in stunned confusion as Shayih quickly laces his trousers back up.
"P-Perhaps I uh... Allow you instead to sleep here... As a way for you to fulfill the initial agreement," he quietly offers into the stagnant air. That seems to wake Afkadar from whatever stupor the other man was in.
"In the weird pocket dimension cellar? Are you..." Afkadar then trails off as he puts a paw to chin in thought. It is quiet for a long awkward time as Shayih shifts about on his paws, waiting for the other man's verdict (he doesn't like the feeling that all this waiting is placing upon his heart). "You know what? Considering that this looks like some collapsed building outside of wherever this place actually exists in time and space, than it has to literally be the safest spot in the city... If this crazy weird wherever actually exists in the city... Whatever. Point is, I'll take you up on the offer instead of trying to bum a couch off of somebody. You know, outside of certain hoity-toity places, your dank murder cellar pocket dimension is probably the best place to sleep at night for a guy without..."
The other bat then trails off but Shayih gets the idea. That said, he does not know what "hoity-toity" is but it sounds funny. He does not vocalize this thought, he doesn't think the lost look upon Afkadar's muzzle would appreciate his observation.
After a while, Afkadar stands up and walks up to him before grabbing his forearm and giving it a firm shake. The other bat's smile is wide and fake. He doesn't know what this ritual means but apparently it is being used to signal a deal being decided upon with both parties being supposedly pleased.
Odd. The bats in this town continue to be otherworldly and odd to him.
"Sure, I'll sleep down here with you in this weird damp cellar that shouldn't even exist."
Shayih smiles for the first time since meeting Afkadar. Unlike his partner's fake smile, his is real. "It is a pleasure to have you here. I am glad you are choosing to stay here than anywhere else out on those poisoned stones."
Afkadar just looks at him with suspicion but it soon peters out. "I guess I need to get used to you spouting weirdly cryptic descriptions for everyday things. Next time just say that the streets are dangerous. It'll save you leafing through the mental thesaurus you apparently have."
Afkadar then claps his paws and then gestures to his little underground home in the town.
"Right, anything I should know?"
Shayih points to a corner of the cellar where a small dark patch sits innocently in the dirt. "I ate the corpse of a man over there."
It goes very quiet.
"Right, okay, message received," Afkadar says in a slightly screechy voice, "Don't sleep there then, got it."
Shayih spends the next few moon cycles coming to know the strange being that is Afkadar, the bat that makes a place deep in his soul sing with the feeling of surety and completion. He knows that their souls are tethered but is it something that skews romantic or platonic? That is the question that he seeks out to answer as the nights get warmer as the planting season gives way to the time of sprouts and early growth.
He misses his home, it sits within him like a deep ache that won't heal, a longing for something unnameable that he is both beholden to return to and reluctant to do so. His mission here is still incomplete, he still has so much he needs to accomplish.
"So uh... Tell me about yourself, Shayih."
He's brought out of his musings and back into reality. He sits at a nice place that Afkadar has called a cafe (something he has only heard about in stories from pa, where this mythical black drink both makes you perk up and causes bowel movements, Shayih is interested in trying it for those two things seem quite at odds with one another) after his partner had suggested that they take the time to get to know one another.
Something called a "date"? Every day is a "date" to Shayih as it exists on the calendar, the dates of the planting seasons, the firewood harvesting seasons, the long periods of moonless nights that mark the dates where the snows fall...
A paw is waved in front of his muzzle as his partner glares at him, frustrated smile upon those handsome lips as Afkadar contemplates strangling him, he's sure.
"Welcome back to the land of the living," his partner snarks at him, "Once again. Come on, Shayih, can you stay present with me for more than 2 seconds anymore? I can't be that boring..."
Afkadar then trails off and falls into musing himself and Shayih takes this moment to simply observe his partner, the one that his soul rung out as saying that they were to be together for life in some capacity. Handsome, for sure, Shayih quite likes how the other bat looks aesthetically. Prissy, petty... Fussy if he had to encompass all of the other man's personality in one. He is, once more, brought back into the present as Afkadar lets out a long and frustrated sigh. He watches as the other bat runs a hand down his face and then look up to the moon before mouthing, "Why me?" almost inaudibly.
Why Afkadar indeed, Shayih thinks to himself, before the other bat starts talking.
"You know, now that I think about it... Why is..."
Afkadar then gestures to everything around them, about the other bats going about their business.
"I do not know what you mean?"
Afkadar gestures harder to the people that walk upon the harsh stone streets (apparently that is called concrete, Shayih is learning new things all the time from his partner), the claws on their paws clicking on the unforgiving material. He misses the soft loam of the forest, the grasses that tickle his paws, the mud that squishes between his toes... He still viscerally hates this town.
"I still do not see what you mean, they are just other bats going about their night. Unless you are wondering what it is that fills their nights so? I often wonder that myself and am tempted to follow after them to see what it is that makes them tick-"
"No! Gods, can you just..." Afkadar yells out to him before said bat gets up out of his seat and walks to the sidewalk at the end of the cafe's metal tables. They're such nice iron designs, honestly, he would take one with him if it didn't involve lugging 45 kilos worth of unwieldy metal back up to his home.
He then watches as Afkadar waves at him and steps right into the busy street full of various unknown bats walking and running to and fro. The crowd moves and sways around his partner, parting much like water in a stream around the man. The crowd does as Shayih has come to observe it does in this town: the bats on the street do not stop to consider the man standing in the middle of their pathway.
They certainly have never stopped to consider him as he walked about their streets, only Afkadar.
That is but another reason to why he knows that this bat is meant to be his.
"I still do not see what you mean," he calls out to Afkadar, "Again, this still just looks like people being people to me."
His partner slaps his face so hard that Shayih can hear it from where he's sitting. He hopes that Afkadar hasn't seriously hurt himself due to the amount of exasperation his partner is strangely feeling.
Shayih then watches as his partner starts walking about in the moving river of bats. Just like they always do for himself, the bats on the streets move out of the way, sometimes even bumping into one another, as they try to avoid running into or hindering Afkadar's movement through them.
"I still don't see what the issue is..." he mutters under his breath before speaking loud enough for Afkadar to hear him, "Again, these people are just acting like they always do!"
Afkadar looks back at him and he watches as his partner goes through various emotions in the span of only a few moments. It starts at bewilderment as Afkadar stares off into the middle distance to process his words before it morphs into shock then horror before finally settling on an expression of intense grief. He watches Afkadar mutter something under his breath before slowly sinking down onto the dusty asphalt, curling up to hug his knees in what Shayih thinks is likely despair.
Shayih wonders if he had looked much the same when he discovered pa had left earth to rejoin ma up in the stars. What did his partner feel had died?
Worried, he stands up from his seat and joins his huddled partner out in the street, the people moving around them like they were just stones in a river.
Shayih's favourite thing to show his partner had been the stars on the nights it was clear enough to leave the horrid suffocation of the town.
Apparently Afkadar had no idea that the cosmos held so many points of light upon it nor that the moon could shine so brightly or even about the purple gash across the sky where the heavens suffered a great wound, the scar of which is visible to all those here on earth. His partner had confessed to him one fateful night that he had never saw the need to step out of the town, away from civilization, because nature held no draw to him.
That night Shayih quietly wept for the reality that most of those people that live in the city had no idea about what was actually around them for they had never stepped foot out of their bat-made bubble. They were but birds trapped in a cage of their own making, and while that is something he has always suspected since he stepped into this gods awful place, to have it handed to him on a platter was like that grief had hit him renewed.
It also gave him a renewed sense of conviction to get his partner out of this mire of blind and mindless people that refuse to escape their own hell.
It has now been a few moons since he had met Afkadar and he feels like it would be safe to bring up the topic of returning to his home back up the mountain next spring to his partner. He had missed the first planting of the season coming down the mountain and by the time they would make it back to his cabin, they would have missed the second planting season by half a moon. Certainly some crops would grow but not enough to sustain them over the winter or even get their bodies ready for the snows to begin with.
He thinks Afkadar will go with it, he's seen the growing restlessness that suffuses his own limbs growing within his partner the longer that they both now observe the people in town. Apparently this new perspective shocked his mate, that of looking at the people going about their lives as if they weren't aware of being observed, but Afkadar had also confessed that he had always been rather wrapped up in his own survival to really notice others.
Shayih rolls over to face his partner as he lays next to the other bat but soon enough his mind wanders away from him as he notes the state of their little basement dwelling. Thanks to the presence of another bat, they have accumulated a few bits and pieces of various items and furniture. Most is from Afkadar, furniture, clothing and knickknacks from his old dwelling that he was afraid would be tossed or sold out from under his feet if he didn't go get them after that first week that they were together.
Shayih quite thinks that these supposed land lords are spiritually poisoned beings with nothing but hatred coursing through their arteries and veins when Afkadar explains to him the various ways that his partner's land lord "fucked" him over.
In his opinion, sex should be something enjoyable but he's seen how the bats in this town will rape indiscriminately so what does he know.
"I can feel you staring a hole into the back of my head, Shayih, what is it?" his partner grumbles out in an annoyed growl. He watches as Afkadar grumpily looks over his shoulder back at him.
His partner is so cute glaring at him with mussed hair and fur, half hidden under the blankets of their bed... But then his musings are cut short by the most aggrieved sigh he's heard his partner utter yet.
Oops.
"I was... Thinking," he says stupidly, tongue getting stuck on his thoughts, "A-about next spring...?"
He trails off and watches out of the corner of his eye as Afkadar mumbles something before rolling onto his back and just... Stares at him. Granted that it's a frustrated stare born of not being able to fall asleep, but it does get his mind back on track.
"I was thinking about the next move," he continues, willing his mouth to cooperate with his thoughts for once, "It's too late in the year to return so going home is out of the question but... I just..."
He struggles to come up with the last of his thought so he just... Tries and rambles his thought process.
"This town is awful and I'm tired of being here but I can't safely take you back up the mountain because there will be no time to gather enough food and supplies to make winter bearable and as comfortable as it can be during the snows. We have seen everything that this place has to offer, been and visited all the establishments you like, but the luster is gone and there's nothing new here and I just want to leave but I don't want to make you do something you aren't ready to do so... Do you want to leave?"
Afkadar is silent for a long moment, simply absorbing his trail of thoughts and subsequent word vomit, apparently carefully thinking about his answer.
Or... At least Shayih hopes his partner is contemplating a thoughtful answer and not just staring at him hoping that something ill befalls his person. He apparently is, and he's quoting here, "One of the most annoying cryptic assholes I've ever met, Shayih, I don't know how you keep surprising me but you do and gods help me, I find it woefully endearing so really who's the fool here?"
"Sure."
He's brought back into the moment when he hears Afkadar speak up.
"Sure...?" he asks tentatively, voice shaking at the possibility that it was but a joke.
"Sure," his partner replies, "I'm tired of this city, too."
And then Afkadar rolls over to face him and shoves his face into the fluff on his chest.
"Now shut up and go to sleep," is the grumpy response he gets.
Huh...
Well, Shayih muses, that wasn't as awful as he thought it would be. He pulls his partner in closer to him, his paw idly stroking through the fur of Afkadar's back.
Not awful at all.