A murmuration of starlings
Massive thanks to @sometimesiwrite for the excellent beta reading and all round loveliness.
Warnings for smut, smutty smut smut, mentions of injury and angst
Word count: 6,220
A Murmuration of Starlings
Roach and Jaskier are gone, gods knows where, and it’s getting harder to keep moving forward but move he must. There’s nothing but an endless horizon ahead and the weak sun is slipping lower as twilight spreads its fingers through the tangled reed beds. He stumbles with a curse, the ground ever shifting underfoot, sedge tussocks winding around leaden legs.
Sweat prickles at the nape of his neck, his mouth dry, and breath little more than a ragged gasp into the frigid twilight. Eskel would never have been caught out like this, no, his brother would have been more cautious. Not for him a rash encounter such as this. The blood is running thick and hot through his fingers’ fruitless efforts to staunch the flow, as the slow thrum of his pulse briefly quickens, a final flicker of the candle before the darkness engulfs him.
There’s an abandoned skiff amongst the reeds, worn and half rotten but gods he is so tired. Otter spraints tell of rich pickings to be had in the shallows but his hunger has fled, a thief inthe night. Folding his massive frame in the boat he tilts his head back, greets the darkening skies with the upturned tilt of a now glassy gaze. So much pain now, did old Vesemir feel like this when he breathed his last?
The cold is settling in his bones, breath sharp beneath his ribs, paring him back to the very marrow. He pulls his cloak over himself for a blanket, ready to die like a dog, and curls into himself, bites his lip to stifle curses. The wounds are manifold, some beginning to suppurate, the sweet stench of decay filling his nostrils.
Why does death take so long? Time moves so slowly.
He bows his head, drops his gaze to the flaking paint on the inner hull of the boat and tries to meditate as he was taught so many decades ago in the draughty keep at Kaer Morhen. But focus is fleeting. He cannot centre himself and he is almost comically large for the small vessel. His hand pushes against the hull of the boat, as he tries to adjust his position. There’s an item wedged beneath the paddle of a roughly hewn oar, a book, he hadn’t noticed it before.
Hmmm. A fucking romance novel. Breathing his last in a frozen, sodden marshland on the edge of bumfuck nowhere and this, this is the last thing he’ll likely read before he becomes just another dead mutant.
Oh to live a charmed life as one kissed by fair fortune, such as these handsome knights and blushing maidens. Free from the taint of shame, no wary stares or muffled gasps, no furtive pleasures stolen from his own hand.
The pages are thin and well thumbed, the gilded title faded and the leather spine cracked. A flowing script marks the owner’s name. He speaks the name aloud, winces at the sounds his mouth makes around the shape of thewords, his voice hoarse from disuse.
A murmuration of starlings takes flight from the edge of the marshlands, looping and swirling against the violet skies of the late winter afternoon. There’s magic in the way they move, older than music this dance of theirs. Time was, the older folk would say they were omens that they could carry the soul to the lands beyond the mortal realm but now the ways of men have changed and there is no room for the sacred in this world.
