Loki does not want to move. Every fibre of his being is crying "stay". But staying is fear inducing too. He experiences his fear as nausea. Vast rolling waves in a yellow shit ocean of discomfort. He moves. He always moves. It is less intolerable than staying.
He has no idea where is when he stands. He is not cold. It is actually very hot. The thicket he was in is revealed as bamboo. His scratches are bleeding, but only in a halfhearted sort of way.There is only one course open. There only ever is one. He wrenches a knot of hair from his head and ties it to the tallest bamboo shoot, then starts to walk in a slow outward spiral from his hiding place. He needs to know where he began from, not to avoid getting lost. He is already lost.But to give him a chance of becoming found.
His slow cycling takes him gradually up a hill. At the top the city he had run from is revealed in the valley on the other side. He smells it long before he sees it. Sickly sweet, rotten fruit, human shit. And it looks like that too. He is high enough that the slums he remembers living in are made picturesque. But the smell and the waves of heat he sees shimmering up remind him of the poverty and despair of the majority of the residents.
Of course the palace is so big it is clearly recognisable, and the cathedral and the bishops house. And the asylum where he was "cured". It all becomes clearer, but he fights off the memories. He looks away from the city and is rewarded by the sight of the red cloth he used to mark the hiding spot of his emergency stash. Clothes, soap and water, food, coffee, money. He always did this. He did not always find it so easily.
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