Peaks bleed a morning in infancy; so run its graygold rivulets down their slopes. That arbor of sufficient mettle to take root at this elevation bristles with the day's quickening breaths, and among that flurry of precipitous leaves stand fast the often damned, robed but for their hooded eyes. Four sets of murder, curved and straight, thrown and brandished; four vehicles to their use, well-driven, seldom seen.

And among them, before them, an abbreviated mountain heath spills across the weakest grades, space sufficient between the white and brown trunks for brilliant rushes, golds and lavenders, and a particular sedge of great red blooms, favored in grazing by the eucaprion.

"It's eye could displace my stomach."

"Assuming it hadn't already kicked your middle out from 'twixt your shoulders."

"It's of the same flesh as every beast. It will bleed."

"Right—go cut it, then. We'll watch it butt you clear off this mountain."

Dew catches the dripping wound of the morning, and the curved and screwed horns of the eucaprion glint like some gemmed artifices of demigods. Long, white-gray fur ruddy with the seasons dusts shoulders above the crown of any man, as hooves like the bowls of beggars grind the false grasses and teeth like bucklers seize and disintegrate them.

And these four stand beyond its realm of concern, their steps measured by the uncertainty common to lesser beasts.