Xochitl had recognized the smell of Terrence, even among the flowers — the strange clear watery smell of the surface; the particular earth of the Furnace.  He had never approached Xochitl before, but Xochitl remembered the manner in which he passed, scrambling loudly up stone cliffs, nimble and proud, the fall of his hoofbeats solid, strong; once, a pause when he had noticed Xochitl, but nothing more. 

Now, Xochitl lifted his sightless head and turned towards him.  His whiskers quivered.  At his flank, Eltequi’s ghostlight darted suspiciously backward. 

“Is this yours?” 

Terrence’s voice suited his smell, brassy and sharp. 

Xochitl cocked his head, drew the air through his teeth, across his palate.  Terrence held something towards him — metal and dirt and very old.  It smelled cold. 

“It does not smell like mine,” Xochitl decided. 

“Well, must be.  It’s got your sigil on it.”

Xochitl paused. 

In the pause, Terrence came abruptly closer; placed something around his neck, cold chain, heavy pendant.  It sat at the hollow of Xochitl’s throat. 

Deadweight, he thought, and did not say.

“Looks about right to me.  Alright, gotta run — see you around, okay?” 

“Goodbye,” Xochitl said, and did not move until the smell and sound of Terrence had gone, swallowed by the green of the Moors, the faint rot-sound of earth digesting and shifting and thrumming with souls. 

---

The amulet weighed less than Eltequi when Eltequi tired and dwindled downward to rest at his hindquarters.  He might have forgotten about it entirely, but—

“The smell.” 

Eltequi shivered irritably. 

“Yes.  That too.” 

The old, old smell.  Like stone dredged up from bedrock.  Like it carried with it the dust of ages.  

And the way it felt against his chest — cold, even after hours against his skin. 

---

Xochitl smelled it first — the seep of something electric in the air.  The taste of ozone on his tongue.  He lifted his head from where he had stopped to graze among the sparse, reedy grass of the Moors.  Scented at the air.  It came silently — very far away and then suddenly very near.  He could feel the movement of it; the air parting around it, the disturbance of space in the flow of its path. 

It snarled. 

A wolf sound on a Courser’s dead tongue. 

And the amulet—

tugged. 

“Oh,” he whispered.  “Oh.” 

The ghost-thing prowled around him.  His ears pricked towards it.  His whiskers felt the stirring of it.  The amulet, too, shivered against his skin, so cold, so ancient, suddenly alive with the recognition of its master. 

“It is yours.”

The rumble of its breath was the warmest thing Xochitl had felt all day. 

“The Harvester told me about you.” 

Something old, something angry.  Xochitl thought of the Harvester — where it could be now, the rotting-fruit smell of it faint but not gone; whether he could track it— 

It was not his job.  He ducked his head, and the amulet leapt from around his neck towards the spectral thing that circled him.  It rushed forward — Xochitl’s whiskers trembled with the motion—

The amulet never hit the ground.  Xochitl felt the crackle-sting of an electric fire, the passage of a ghost leaking through him, bone-deep; then it was gone.  

The Moors were silent around him. 

In time, the smell of it faded, too.