Hindiro sat by himself savoring the creative moments of silence that would soon be severed from their precious idealistic roots. He needed time to think, but it seemed that the moments of pure silence, where thoughts bloom best, waned away like the seconds on a clock. His guest would be here soon and she would slaughter any silence; down to the thickest parts of the forest that hide in quiet like a rabbit hides in the brush.
He started his thinking session by looking around him. He was grounded in a clearing a few miles into the humid forest. The sight was plain, though not depressing. There were no unicorn meadows nor babbling brooks nor steep magical waterfalls that spurted rainbows. It was lush though, with the natural wonders surrounding him, which he could live with. The saplings that dappled the ground around his paws painstakingly pushed their way through the ancient ground and showed off their tropical orange blossoms proudly. The area around the clearing was thickly wooded; spaced out just enough for travelers to leave on the one-person-wide path and for small birds to dash in between canopies of emerald bundles. Leaves rustled a tune that was not foreign to him. The trees sighed as their weary trunks creaked in the wind. Strange bugs did things that strange bugs did; they flipped, they rolled, and they lived without purpose. He guessed that they had as much purpose as he did though. What was purpose anyway?
After all, the only things he had ever done in his life were disappoint his father, run away to leave his mother to take the hits, and shack up ungratefully with someone he could never repay. He had no purpose.
Yet, unlike the beetles and the flies, he was trying. That's why he was here. The woman he had shacked up with had talked of owning a creature that wandered these parts, called the Moonling. She had hoped, she had prayed, so he was here, searching for one. He thought if he could do this one thing for her, he'd actually belong there with her without a burden on his back. For once in his life, it wasn't about what he deserved and what he didn't deserve; it was about what she deserved. What she deserved for taking him in as a pup, for caring for him, for sheltering him from ever being hurt by family again; she deserved the world.
But as for his mother, he did not know how much he could try. A lump in his throat formed. Had he not been so badly injured as a child, to where half his body was mechanical, he could have cried there. Him and his mother were in the same situation. The walls would roar and the furniture shake. The floors themselves would hide, because of his father. His father's fury, his father's yelling, his father's lashings. There was no safe place, for him or his mother. He hit them. He hit them. That feeling emerged again, and he thought he could drowned himself in the tears he couldn't cry. They handled his father's abuse in different ways though. His mother drank. His memories of his mother were the bottom of a whiskey bottle and trips to town to buy more. He was the one who took the hits. That was his contribution. That, besides buying alcohol, was how he helped his mother. He took the worst of the beatings and his mother only got a tiny ripple from the tsunami. If dinner wasn't warm, he was grabbed by his hair and thrown against the wall. If the television wasn't working, he was punched until he bled tears. And the first time he tried to run away...
As he knew it would, an out of place sound came breaking over the horizon. A quadruped padded over the hills on the long path to get to Hindiro's no-so-secret secret place. The bounce in her step was giddy and light, and told him that his guest was finally here.
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