The morning was falling, bringing with it an autumn chill that drove him further into the recesses of his scratchy jacket and tartan scarf, grasping the edges of his coat, the edges of his patience, until the trees cracked with the tang of the season. A few sidesteps later and he stood to appraise the terrain once again from where he was  knee deep in the faded grasses.

spiral and shiv's baby

He loved dawn; it was such a private hour, so solitary save the faint stirrings of creatures emerging from the scant constellations of their lives despite the melancholy of fall's slow decay. Here, winter was about to put footsteps in the meadow, and the man pressed forward leaving his own.

spiral and shiv's baby

Around the next bend in the grass, beyond the next turn, footfalls of a herd of tauros across stone echoed across the way, or further into the dim morning, with confident growls, wild pokemon could be seen trotting along the edge of the path with a whole parade of younglings in tow. Flannel fields of yellow and blacktop diverge and skylines  rust with the coming light. Arrows of starly fire from a windbreak, a thatch in the October coloring of season's end. Some murkrow alight overhead, three, four, a flock on the wing - sharp eyed with intent and field-bound. His shadow cut in gold against the pale horizon, the sun a lion-colored puddle as it lifted among whirls of cumulus and cirrus so high they tossed no shadows below.

spiral and shiv's baby

The air was wild with leaves more gorgeous than ever in October crimson and russet; the first touch of frost would lay them bare, all laid low - falling away, falling in love with the ground. Past the misty-eyed, spectral lakes overhung with weeping trees where taillow were singing shrilly in the morning cold, he ambled on watching the leaves. A pair of them floated down, amber and gold in the between the sun's low slanting rays. Dandelion, foxglove, wild mint, goldenrod, nightshade all nodding along with an unfelt wind as a thread-bare veil of mist obscured, but did not cloak the fields;  instead it gave them a lilac hue.

spiral and shiv's baby

It was a day like a slow-motion video of dawn. He had just emerged from a thorny thatch on the crest of an open hillside and could glimpse through the bright half light all the way to the meadow; mountains faint on either side of him massed dark against the ruddy glow of a cloudy sunrise. Mellow edge of the sun broke over the Safari cloud bank as the earth would drain up into the sky by the end of the morning. A deeper run of color marked the fragments of cloud with stolen gold and set the grasses afire.

spiral and shiv's baby

The morning was languorous as it broke in one sheet of fair light just shy of the fields that meandered just far enough to give unenclosed character to the landscape. Smells slipped by in ribbons; gleams of pale grass and dark mud, honey and bracken, mint and straw, cedar and cloves. Even the sunlight had a tender, copper scent that he would've known anywhere as the advent of autumn and thinking the equinox had arrived here, late but lasting. Amid the verdure of the brackish elms was a dark monotony; no quiet effacement of foreground or color, every corner was alive, proposing a somewhat ecological aesthetic to preface the season.

spiral and shiv's baby