Borealis Eighteen - Lefts of Passage

     Howl frowned at the dunes sprawling out in front of him. There seemed no end to them, but he knew that there probably was an end, an end that he would never get to see. He had tried his best to see the end of the desert once, but even the tip of the tallest skyscraper in Borealis had not been high enough to look beyond the horizon. It frustrated him. He knew that if his eyes were unable to make the journey, then surely the rest of his body would fair far worse, and his body was already capable of so much at such a young age. Howl could leap, duck, zig and zag with the best of the Unfortunate Ones of the city, rough up anyone he came across, and track even the faintest of trails so long as the sun shone and the wind was kind. Nothing really intimidated or challenged the boy's presence in the least, save his father, but here stood the desert, mocking the boy's very existence. It more than frustrated him. It made him angry.
     Howl spat at the ground. He had intended for his saliva to serve as his direct challenge to the desert's vastness, an assertion of his superiority over the sand and the heat. But, the childishness of his gesture did little more than to exacerbate Howl's feelings of futility and insignificance in the midst of such grainy eternity.
     "I hate you," Howl said to no one.
     The wind blew up from behind him as if to hug and comfort him as though a mother might do, but he shrugged it off as though he were a son embarrassed at his mother's ignorance of her child's approaching maturity. Another breeze soon came by, this time indifferent to the boy's woes. A single strand of it caught itself upon Howl's clothes, curving all along the air pockets of his posture as it made its way up his body. The strand carried with it a note of burnt air and the smell of cooking. The boy's nose pricked and tickled at the scent, reminding him that he had more to do than lament his preadolescent humanity.
     "Eggs," Howl muttered to himself as he walked over to the building from which the scent seemed to originate. "Only you, Garnet."