Augromme, the undead elephant, bellowed forcefully. It was a coarse and meaty bellow and it surprised him. He hopped a few paces away to escape the sound of it.
He had been out in the pasturelands for several hours but it could have been decades given the kaleidoscopy of Augromme’s inner reality. He lingered momentarily near some shrubs, his gaze throbbing intensely on nothing. Then, he snuffled around in the grass and began a light gallop through the pasture.
Memories dawned around him. They were like the peals of a tolling morning church bell, reverberating and distant. He recalled a long ago adolescence, surly and overflowing with elephant friends. He felt the sound of gigantic barn doors creaking open, the beckon of an outside world. In the breeze he could almost feel that herbaceous humidity of the fresh hay someone used to lay down for him each and every night. He felt that itch. The one which had persisted on the underside of his foot and kept him awake at night for years. He recalled the purple greens of a bouquet of spinach, lovingly swirled in the nose of an elephantpanion. Or had it been a limp bundle from the clutch of a lever boy?
A colorful bird flew by. Augromme lost the thread of what he had been thinking about. While he had forgotten it, an afterglow of the thought still filled him with a feeling he missed. He became frustrated that he was feeling a memory that he could no longer remember. Anger boiled up in him. This felt more normal. The rage covered up his melancholy and he soon felt calm again, tuckered out from the volatility of his emotions and the middling walk in the grasslands.
Someone was waving at him. It was Ungulen — or as Augromme thought of him — the man with the food bucket. Augromme scampered back towards the fence for feeding.
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