Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
phoenix Flute
"This isn't over." He spits out a splinter, and the lame animal next to him roll its eyes.
"Stories are just songs without the melody," says the hunter, his withered hands whittling another shaving from his near-finished flute.
"When you break them down into those few verses cut up with a chorus," he says, the carver he never could've afforded under normal circumstances running rivulets in the worn out wood, "then any song seems to stop being a song." His words rub the air with the same gravelly crunch as the small stones his bare soles play with.
The fawn looks at him with the same bored heed it had when he'd found it beaten up at the bottom of the ravine he'd fled through. The volcano's tough terrain wouldn't slow the carver's seekers much.
"What happens when you unwind a story like that is it loses all meaning," the hunter says, forearm tattoos rippling as he lines out the flute's lip-plate. "Just like what happens when you sing something one too many times, what happens in your mind is you think the story starts to die."
Ash shifts under the fawn's lone restless and unbroken leg, kicking up sulfur stench. The island he'd absconded to was as much a deathbed for him as it was for this recently downed deer, the putrefied ghosts under his swollen feet silently calling for them both.
The hunter's mouth twitches up at the sides, his eyes on the instrument. "But here's the thing," he says, standing and digging his tattered toes deep into the island's eroded past. "Just like a song, you keep a story from being broken by making sure the listener's always left wondering."
His pursuers crash through the nearby brush, the mare-mounted men spearing straight for him. He brings up the whistle.
The fawn lifts its head to meet the hunter's eyes, its first sign of interest, and his breath flows through the pipe. The inked phoenix feathers starting at his hands glare gold, and the ground stirs.
"You have to keep giving them something they don't quite expect," he says, his voice thinner. The flute now thrums unaided in one hand as the blade lies blunt in the other. The conductor rising within the hunter spills out until the golden ink feathers begin to pulsate.
The pulse bleats a methodical bass in tune with the low and slowly growing rumble of many haunted hooves stomping up the basalt steps of the island's roots. His ashen army encircles the pair of them, each mutated specter threaded with the same molten gold as the hunter's arms.
He winks at the fawn, and it just tilts its head. "That's the secret of story. You only create more of what you destroy," and the ash horde collides with the opposing cavalry, neither truly aware that man's greed will never match nature's.
A hunter, now hunted. His prey in another life, now his only friend in death. Set within its deep black eyes shine a musician's silhouette as its arms chop through charged air. The horde’s birthing fault line erupts in a crescendo, its impossible mouth gaping wide to swallow all into its infernal belly.
The magic knife would be safe in its magmatic maw, but its story wasn't over. Stories never were, they only ever burned to rise anew from old ashes.