London’s rainy streets were filled with pedestrians rushing along them and I stood cautiously underneath main street’s library overhang, which had been sheltering me from the downpour for the last twenty or so minutes. I, as an Artist, had been simply observing people as they walked, dodged, jumped and stood in the rainy obstacle course. Then quickly sketching their forms down into my beat up sketchbook, which had pages brimming with year old drawings from this same place on the same day at the same hours. I spotted a woman in a black leather coat wearing a feathered hat that, in better weather conditions, would have been fluffy as a chick, but it drooped like the fur of the wet dog on my feet. My pencil moved without me having to look at the paper, I only looked at the woman and her droopy hat. My concentration was so all consuming that at first I did not notice that man who had sidled up to me with a glint of silver in his hands. The shard of glass was tinted an impenetrable pink that seemed unfitting in the setting full if greys, blacks and browns. The woman disappeared out of view down the street and i looked down at my book and saw her exact double sketched across half the yellowish page. I had completed the nineteenth portrait of a stranger, the last was almost always the most rushed of them all. I then looked around me, searching for my last task, and I saw a figure holding a black umbrella and sporting a black jacket just like the droopy woman’s. Though at the time i did not notice the similarity. The umbrella shadowed his face and I only saw it clearly when the faint light from the library windows dimly illuminated his face. To say it was male was quite an assumption. The man was slightly hunkered and his face was as pale as a daisy on the side of a country road, covered in dust. I startled back as I saw his pale, seemingly unseeing eyes that were not the expected white, but an unworldly light blue that glowed slightly.
Roland stood at the doorway into another world. His bare feet dangled just over the edge. The wind that blew out of the doorway was sweet, the smell of spun sugar.
The empty sky seemed so welcoming with the fluffy clouds that resembled pillows. The faded purple sky was unmarred my the lines of aircrafts and the pollution that comes with humans.
Roland then turned hesitantly around to his bedroom. The walls were covered in posters of bands that had exited when his grandfather was young. There were also clay figures sitting
Sashan was in the forest, thank god. They might just have enough time to escape. The other beasts hunkered and shivered in their cages of impure and partially weak metals. Most of the humans were knocked out on the ground form the last night celebratory party in honour of the General’s new born son. The camp has received a snow signal from the castle were his wife had given birth a few Kekalions away. The red smoke has been awaited for quite a few weeks as the date of predicted birth approached. After the Spotter has yelled out, then fallen from his high perch, resulting in an immediate visit to the medical centre, the soldiers ran straight to the general’s dark green tent. Then they feasted and drank till they fell into their noses like stuffed plums. All except for Sasha. The exceptional hunter in the soldiers ranks. He had sat at the giant table the whole evening without even touching the brimming wine glass that had been placed in-front off him. He simply dipped his water and nibbled surreptitiously at his food. He was in his early thirties with a slight tinge of grey in his beard that crept along as the years went by. Sashan always smelled like the forest and tree after scent of blood. The beasts only really feared him. Their captor. Their hunter. They retreated from the bars at any sign of his figure. If he glowered at a beast and it did not look away, they might just disappear the next day. Into the forest or to the lake.
