Prompt: New beginnings, for dao_challenge
Originally Written: 10/3/10
Notes: I love playing with POV.
STILL NOT SATISFIED, oh well.
He wakes, alone.
His companions are all dead; he isn't fully conscious before he smells the rot, dark-blood and dog-blood mingling in the air, sticking to his fur. He whines, wondering where his keeper has gone, but though he strains his ears he cannot hear the familiar heartbeat. He cannot hear any heartbeats, and so he freezes, mid-standing-up, and cocks his head, sniffing; the only thing his nose returns is death in the air around him-death on the wind-death in the water, as he paws through the broken gate and studies the stream running through the human camp. There are few bodies, but he feels the lay of the land in his paws and knows where the battle occurred, there, where the ridge slopes away to the forest. He may search for his keeper there, with the others, but he knows he will not find him. Death is an ending; his keeper is no more.
And yet, in the agony-haze of the past few days, he picks up the trail of a memory, incomplete and confused; floral? He has no use for flowers, because they blast their perfume for indiscriminate bugs and clog the air for those with more refined senses, but his memory tells him-his tail wags in emphasis-that flowers are important.
So he puts his nose to the ground and sniffs, and finds his keeper's mortar and pestle, and the crushed remains of the medicine that saved him. Medicine implied care, implied keeper, implied flowers, and there, there is the scent of someone living, someone who pricks his ears and wags his tail and turns his head north, trailing flowers in their wake.
He loves this someone.
His pack is dead, his keeper dead, the ground muddy with dark-blood and dog-blood and human-blood, the forest silent. But he can smell the flowers, and follow their scent, and so he puts paw in front of paw and barks, heading home.