#thinking of pyre and also that guy that when you wanna larp as him you call yourself exilus

[laughingpinecone]

822w, complete, General Audiences, No Archive Warnings Apply Fandom: Dinotopia - James Gurney Characters: Original Characters Additional Tags: Worldbuilding, Celebrations, Shipwrecks, New Beginnings, Utopia Summary:

Lanterns kindle a new life on the shore.

Yuletide treat for reeby10!

Once upon a time there was an exile cast upon an empty shore, all alone in the world as even the remains of his ship had been taken from him, carried away by the waves. With his first conscious breath, in a weak, hoarse whisper, saltwater burning his throat, he said: “Curse this dying world.”

The fresh night did not pay heed to his bitterness. All across the shore, moonlight kept shining over sparkly grains of sand and birds slept in the reeds, knowing nothing of failure. The world would keep on turning. But somewhere beyond the horizon, along with the last lights of the day, a dream of a better society was drawing its last breaths. They tried. They lost. They fled and failed at that, too, dousing their last small torch of hope in the storm.

The exile cursed his aching muscles too, and the dripping, cold, heavy fabric sticking to his skin and dragging his limbs back against the ground as he clung to a rock and fought to drag himself up, weak and trembling like a fawn. He shivered as a breeze caressed him, then was struck by a bone-deep terror that filled his flesh with screams and smoke: at the far end of the beach, where the cliffs met the sea, rows of lanterns were descending along a narrow path. He remembered the torches, the patrols. The hunt continued in this foreign land and the exile once again knew that he needed to hide. He needed to flee, to put one shaky leg in front of the other, accepting that he would fall down and eat sand and drag himself up again until the ends of the earth. But here, as the last remnant of their shipwrecked dream, without his people, without his cause, he found that he could not hide and he could not flee. His muscles refused to budge. He stood there, trembling, empty, as his fate caught up to him.

The procession cut strange silhouettes against the night sky.

At last, through the wind, he heard drums, and trumpets, and singing. The song was sung in many languages, which the exile did not recognize. He thought he heard, like in a dream, a fragment of his mother’s tongue: “To companions lost at sea,” it said, but it was soon gone, submerged by a tide of inscrutable syllables. Perhaps he was dreaming. The procession crossed the beach like night spirits, letting their singing rise over the jingling of ornaments and staves and then fall silent again like the ebbing of the waves.

And the creatures. No such beasts could have ever walked the earth, as big as an elephant and so armed with horns and crests of unimaginable shapes. These dragons, these spirits of legend, walked as one with the humans in their midst, carrying palanquins and jars, and pouches filled with flowers, and sang, in their own way, with rhythmic clicks and hums.

They all sang to the sea and did not see him. They would go away, as mysteriously as they had appeared, and he would be free to die on that beach, and take the last ember of his dream with him. One trembling step after the other, in the impossibly dilated time of dreams, he moved away from the safety of the rock and toward the procession. “Don’t leave me alone,” he pleaded to this vision, but his throat was parched and he had no voice, and they did not speak his language, anyway. When he reached them and walked along the edge of their tracks, he did not dare approach them. If he were to die walking with ghosts, witnessing, unseen, a glimpse of joyful coexistence, it would be enough. But a child turned around and smiled at him under a thick flower crown, and threw petals at him, then, struck by some form of understanding of his situation, she turned to a grand beast with a crown of horns and picked up a bronze watering can from the bags on its sides. She gave him water. He drank, cried, then drank some more. A swift bipedal dragon tiptoed around the unexpected scene and whispered in its clicking tongue to a man nearby, who gave his standard to the exile, so that he could use its pole as a walking stick to steady his steps. The dragon shook a piece of painted cloth off its back and gave it to him, musky and rough, to use as a cloak. Its unknown symbols felt warm on his back. Honey-filled pastries exchanged hands until they reached him, and he found strength. A creature like a turtle shielded him from the cold land wind. The night was filled with lanterns.

As the words of his mother’s tongue reached him again, he sang with them: To companions lost at sea / come to our shores as flowers / we will spend a day together / in spring...

#dinotopia #fanfiction #to finding new beginnings... #thinking of pyre and also that guy that when you wanna larp as him you call yourself exilus #but other fandoms aside I really wanted to revisit Dinotopia and I'm glad I got a tiny chance