Gilgamesh

I stood hanging on the rail of the fence looking at the solitary figure beyond. How long I'd been perched there I didn't know but the sky had begun to take on the plume of rich ripe tospit skin. The dark creature turned his head my direction more than once, dredging a huge paw into the ground and raking up tufts of grass behind him. Threat meant to psyche an opponent out with fear. The sling of his head and the snorting bellows thundered across the coral spraying noxious fluids on any and all that came near. I didn't move. I just stayed there on the side of the rail. Quiet, letting the wind carry my scent on it to him.

Cana had warned me not to get close, to stay clear of the animal. She had said he was dangerous. It seemed any animal on this world fit that category .. in many ways those that walked aright on two feet as well as those one four or more. He knew I was there, he could smell me, he could taste me with the loll of his tongue as he shook his head and raced a few paces straight toward me then veered to snort. Fragments of dirt clung to my arms and lines of it painted my shins where it wove between the wooden barrier. I just watched him. I had asked if I could find herbs for his pelt. He needed a bath and a good brushing, something for bad breath without a doubt and ... a lot of TLC ... that was how Trilock had put it of his own beast and that was when the woman gave me the warning. I've never seen her as she was that night. She has never backed off protecting a beast but all she would say of this one was he would be allowed to live.

I felt more than heard the jamming of the massive talons into the ground as he began a new charge. He was heading straight for me now. He wasn't the tamed creature other mounts were. In his heart beat something wild and fierce, something dark and foreboding. I could hear it. I could feel it make my own heart echo and throb in the hollow of my breasts. I was frightened but I didn't move. I didn't budge even when the shriek hit a decibel that hurt my ears and he blew strands of saliva all over me, not even when one of those savage liquid eyes was right in front of mine. It lit with the mirror of the sky and of me and then it swirled with something else. Reddened plumes rose, dancing swirling in a roiling slither in its depths. It was not anything I could have described to another person of this world. I was looking into the depths of hell itself with the silohuette of darkness shadowing the center. It was coming through from another place and the terror that shone in the glassy surface paralyzed me. I knew nothing as the animal hit the rails full charge except the fracturing of the wood, not even being tossed to the ground hard.

A new scream came from the animal and he charged off again around and around the ring trying desperately to find escape of what it had seen, what it had .. experienced. I lay there shaking, sucking in air and staring at the sky. Cana had called him Holo but I lay there whispering ... Gilgamesh, the lone warrior to face the demons of the underworld.