“You realize, the probability of this happening is astronomically small.”

Kyu turned to face his daughter, squinting against the bright summer sun.  They had come to this isolated beach for solitude and, in Jessamine’s case, safety - when one had just come back from the dead, one did not want to draw attention to one’s self.  Waves crashed against a steep, rocky shore, driven by a brisk wind; soon enough the water would be up above the dark pebbles that marked the tide line. 

“Only once in every -  I don’t know, 500 years maybe.  Only once in 500 years does one of my line breed true.  And then, only if the mother is a Fox, herself.”

He turned away again to face the ocean and dropped a pair of sunglasses down over his blue eyes, missing Jessamine’s careless shrug.  Kyu was soliloquizing, and his daughter knew nothing would stop him from it.

“Tan got lucky.  I’m not sure he’d have been able to find his way back,” Kyu continued with a faint frown.  “That was an artificial resurrection.  You’re the only other Fox I know - hell, that I’ve even heard of - to come back the way I always do.  That’s quite a trick.”

“It could be your mother’s bloodline,” he added after a moment’s thought.

It was flattering to the Fox to know that he had a true heir, of sorts, and that her kind was a precious jewel among otherwise ordinary siblings.  He did not love the other two children he knew of any less than her, but there was something that now bonded him to his most wayward daughter, though they had never been close.  All at once he wanted a larger part of her life, and felt he could let her go at last - she could care for herself, after all, even in death.

“That’s right.  Any mirror - as long as you can hold it in your mind, you’re there.”

Kyu laid the leather-bound book out on the shoddy plastic tabletop and tapped its cracked cover knowingly.  Culain looked less than impressed.

“Think about that.  -Any- mirror.  You find yourself thinking about that gorgeous babe you went home with last night.  You think about the mirror on the vanity in her bedroom.  Open this book up, hold that vanity in your mind - and you’re there.”

Culain scowled and pushed his fork through the weepy fried eggs on his plate.  Lunch with the Fox could never be an easy thing.  It always had to be about his newest toy, his newest conquest.  Kyu loved telling stories, and more often than not they’d be about how perfectly excellent -he- was.

“I guess this is where I say you ought to respect other peoples’ privacy,” he grunted.  “Then you laugh, and I grumble about it for a while.”

“Have I become predictable?” Kyu asked with feigned disappointment.  “Maybe this time I’ll say - you’re right, old chum.  I shall never touch this delicious Book again.  Fox’s honor.”

Culain merely scowled down on his mediocre brunch and fished a soggy fried potato out of the yellow soup of his egg yolk.

allcreatures:

Meet the real-life Fox & Hound: A fox cub that was rescued from certain death after he fell into a quarry has been nurtured back to health - by a dog. The male cub, named Copper, was rescued three weeks ago by a family who discovered him cold and malnourished at the bottom of a quarry in Portreath, Cornwall. He was handed in to a local fox rescue centre and was put into the care of wildlife expert Gary Zammit. But Gary’s dog Jack, a one-year-old lurcher, took over the nursing duties at the Feadon Farm Wildlife Centre

Picture: SWNS (via Pictures of the day: 18 May 2010 - Telegraph)

Here our story deviates from Things Past.  Early in the twenty-first century, the Fox met another bird who stole his heart, though it took nearly a century for him to admit it. 

It began with a hotel bar and a wounded boy.

If the Fox could tell the story now, he would embellish it and make it out to be a heroic rescue.  It was, instead, a set of random chances both taken and lost - if not for the specific way the evening had unfolded, no doubt the Fox would have taken what he wanted and left his prey behind. 

The boy, his nightingale, was heartsick, and the Fox picked him out of the thin bar crowd like a wolf cutting a wounded calf from the herd.  The emotionally wounded made easy prey, and he meant to simply lure the boy back to his den and take what pleasure could be had from him.  Instead, he found a bird with broken wings, fluttering helplessly and defiantly in the face of the world.  There was something in him that went beyond what the Fox thought he coveted, and though he did bring him back to his den, it was not for the carnal pleasures he thought he was after.

Instead, the very next morning, after giving the boy a couch to sleep on and ample personal space, the Fox cooked him a breakfast of eggs and left it at that.

Their story is a long one and complex, but it is founded upon that simple, uncharacteristic breakfast: a plate of eggs and a friendly smile from a Fox devoid, for once, of ulterior motives.

Trecius had been beaten so many times in his long life that he could no longer count his individual failures.  For him, the past blended into a string of indignities, each one undeserved.  After all, was he not responsible for the shadow by which God’s light shone the brightest?  Had he not crafted the very thing used by the Heavenly Host to beat back their enemies and punish the sinful?  From his twisted, rotting mind had come one of the most fundamental things about the Way the World Worked, and he had been cast down for it.  Cast down, even as the Light and the Word put -his- craft into Creation.  Death had not even existed in the mind until Trecius thought of it.  Pain was a concept no angel could wrap his head around until the Hellmuse had concieved of it. 

This latest injustice was salt on an old wound.  Twice now he had attempted to trap the Fox, and twice the beast had slipped through his fingers at the moment of his triumph.  This last time he’d had all of them - the Fox, the Fox’s daughter and son, the Fox’s lover - and they had all escaped him, escaped from his own throne room. And now the Light and the Word had sealed the realms, leaving Trecius locked again in Hell like a chained dog.   

The Hellmuse paced the hall like a caged animal, splendid in his madness.  His wings arced behind him, massive and glossy black, a condor’s broad, dark wings.  His flesh seemed to crackle with energy, ripling like a leopard’s pelt as he walked from one end of the room to the other.  Behind him trailed a tide of hyshea, their small black bodies moving as one animal, and they seemed not to sense the danger emenating from their furious Creator. 

Suddenly, Trecius turned and snatched one up and tore it to pieces with a fluid gesture of his long-fingered hands.  Dark, half-formed guts spilled to the marble floor, scattering the hyshea’s fellows.  Ribs cracked and splayed as Trecius pulled the beast apart, and still it meweled in puzzlement, startled by the sudden violence and not truly in any real pain.  Trecius dropped the butterflied carcass atop the pile of entrails and bellowed his rage to no one. 

The senseless destruction of one of his own Creations did little to ease his deep hurts. The betrayal and escape of the Fox’s daughter galled him most of all.  He was certain he had her trapped in his palm, and she had thrust a knife in him as soon as his back was turned.  It was infuriating to be caged in Hell when he ought to be out hunting her down.  The longer she had to burrow away to safety, the harder it would be to find her.  Foxes were terribly difficult to unearth once they’d gone to ground. 

The Hellmuse was determined to have her, though.  If he could not spill her father’s blood, he would spill hers, and this time, she would not escape him.  He had promised her that if she betrayed him or ceased to be useful to him, he would not hesitate to kill her - and when it suited him, Trecius was a man of his word.

allcreatures:

Photo: Peter M. Fredin / AP (via SFGate Day in Pictures)

Culain stood in the snow outside the bar, in a patch of slush half-melted by the flickering light above.  The bar was the only building still lit at this hour, but Culain could see down the street in either direction clear as day, the scene lit a pale orange by street lights reflecting off the snow.  The blacktop was patchy with ice, a mottled dark strip between high banks of brown, soiled snow.

It was a late winter here in upstate New York, and the ground felt like it might never thaw.  Old trees bent and broke beneath accumulations of snow.  Flocks of migrating birds returned too soon.  In the woods, deer starved for want of new growth.  People went about bowed by heavy winter clothing, brought together by the lingering freeze.  Everywhere you went - the register at the local grocery, the post office, this small bar - people were talking about the late winter and what it might mean.

Culain delighted in the freeze, in the wide-open spaces and the abundance of dead flesh in the forest, but with none of his fellows beside him to share in his joy, he grew melancholy.  He alone ran between the winter-bare trees, scenting his still-living prey on the snow-clean air.  He alone fell upon the frozen carcasses, to tear the ice-bound hide with his sharp, sharp teeth.

The man stubbed a cigarette out on the frosty windowsill and tossed it away.  Inside the bar, someone was belting a terrible rendition of some new country song, and Culain scowled.  The howls of half-breed coyotes sounded sweeter to his ears.  Still, there was noplace better for company than this bar, and Culain chose drunken kareoke over aching loneliness.  He was a rough man, grizzled as an ash tree in winter, and a big man at that, but despite the imposing largeness and fierceness of him, he made friends easily.

The winter had been so long, so lonely, that he would have almost welcomed the presence of a sly, smiling Fox.

fuckyeahcrows:

elanor grosch

I suppose if I am to write a blog entitled ‘The Fox and the Crane’ I ought to tell you about the Crane.  Trouble is, I don’t know much about her.

No one does, really.

They say, Those Who Know, that it was the Crane who formed the world, shedding water from her breast to form oceans and feathers from her flesh to form the land.  But this is only one story.

They say she met the Fox for supper one evening, and that he served her in a shallow dish to spite her long, narrow beak.

They say she wove her very own feathers into cloth for a poor man that had saved her life, and that this poor man (who had once, long ago, made a deal with Foxes) broke her heart and drove her away.

They say that her heart was the only treasure the Fox never was able to steal.