More Familiar Surroundings (Solo)

Wandering in the shade
Not too old, not too young

[attr="class","quicklinks"]𝓈𝒾𝓁𝓋𝒶𝓁𝒾

[attr="class","quicklinks"]483 words

[attr="class","technoscroll"]It was a feeling of strangeness and nostalgia. The fog that brushed against his feathers, its touch damp and cool against his scales, this was unfamiliar, sending chills trembling lightly through his body in the almost eerie quiet of the woods, the grey air like a thick blanket that muted and muffled the woods. But the feeling of woods all around, the smell of damp rich earth and the weight of trees branching all around him and above him, the feeling of being both outside and yet within a dwelling vaster and wilder then any shelter, this was familiar. The brush of grass and feel of malleable soft earth under claw, the brush of his tail against rough peeling bark, the rustle of leaves, quiet but constant. It was something he hadn't realized he had been missing but which his soul had never stopped yearning to return to.

It was as though it were an ancestral calling, a primal instinct. Maybe it was. It would not have surprised Judas. After all, he could hardly imagine his mother enjoying such a surrounding... no she was fitted to more severe and sharp environments. He only remembered where he had been born vaguely, but what he remembered was rocks, crisp air, clear skies with a view as far as the eye could see. He remembered once thinking he stood at the top of the world, gazing up at the sky in awe, wishing he could reach out to it and touch it. Skychaser his mother had called him.

Judas never touched the sky, but when everyone was gone and he was left alone, he descended and found the wild jungle with its welcoming depths inviting him in. He paused to look at one of the trees, ancient, foreboding in its size and height, a seeming giant from ages long past. How long have you stood here? Judas questioned it silently, a wing reaching out to touch it with its claws. Forever it might have seemed. Yet it was silent, the fog curling around it, wisps reaching up it like coiling snakes. He dug his claws in, then, bunching up his hind muscles, lifted his talons to it, tearing into the bark for a firm grip then ascending upwards. It took a moment, and he slipped a few times as bark crumbled under him, but he made it to a lower branch, balancing there with a flick of his tail as he swayed slightly. A seed-hanging low from another branch on a nub-caught his eye, and he tilted his head at it, then, tentatively, reached out and grabbed it in his beak, pulling it from its leafy nesting spot. Bowing his head slightly to the branch, Judas put it in his tattered bag as he carefully padded forward along the branch, trying to remember his balance again as he closed his eyes a moment in memory.

83u5zsv|1-100