Racked by palsy-like tremors, shortness of breath, nosebleeds and a cough that rattles her bones; the sabino is not fit for much. She exists; drifting through the forest like a thin plagued wraith with an angel’s pale soft wings. Shroud is anything but an angel - full of sin and proud of it! So she haunts the forest, looking for bones and places of rot whenever she is not by her master’s blue side.
Tunnel.
His name is benediction and blight on her tongue, both as she savors the dark flavor of such a name as his. She rolls it around in her mouth like a stone, heavy and dirty and never more loved (or loved less!) for the earthy gritty richness of it. How she enjoyed defying him! Just to have him punish her and keep her tethered to his side, as he had from the day he’d found her lurking in the big bad woods all by her baby-lonesome.
Shroud is in that same defiant but delirious state of plague and boredom. She needs something but cannot guess at what will shake her from these doldrums. So, thinned by sickness and trailing pale feathers that have fallen out of her unkempt wings, she wanders. Wanders up and down the woods, taking this trail then that with no rhyme or reason to the decisions that she makes.
Somehow she ends up trailing a stream that gurgles musically but the music is lost on her. She’s not deaf, just can’t appreciate the charms of clean water and demure breezes sailing by that ruffle her hair and feathers. Shroud doesn’t even appreciate the rich and verdant green that springs up around them through grass, fern, and leaf. Flowers have never been her forte unless they’re poisonous and likely to harm unsuspecting animals.
So the forest-green is unnoticed, of it is - she gives a resigned huff then a snort of disgust and looks for the buzz of flies and the smell of decay that might signal some predator’s kill. Or she’ll find the work of old age - a thing gone to sleep, never to awaken or see another morning because their time has come and gone. Give her the claw marks in flesh and dirt, the signs of a fight, and the brilliant artistic spray of blood. Yes, give her that!
But that’s not what the forest gives her.
The forest parts before into a peaceful glade full of sunshine, birds chirping and chipmunks scurrying by. It looks like a scene straight out of a 1940’s Disney movie and it sickens her; it’s too saccharine and good, both things that she is not. There stands Shroud with her mouth pinched into a spittle-flecked frown before she shivers the wings away from her side and they become insubstantial, like air.
She flaps them to what she thinks is gale-force, causing the bird-chirps to cut off and the chipmunks to go into hiding. Leaves and twigs fly around and the grass is bent by the force of her small manipulative might. Then the moment passes, or more likely falters as blood leaks from her nostrils and her sabino sides heave from exertion. She has effectively slain the peace of the glade but exhausted herself beyond mention too.
Shroud pants, sweats, and trembles. Each step she takes is agonizing as she turns back to the stream and follows it to the parent-river that runs past the trees. She’s not the only one that doesn’t rush right to it; there’s a door nearby, hanging back against the tree line and shadows. Of course she approves of his decision, or fear. She can’t be too sure which it is, and decides it doesn’t matter as she drinks in his rich plum color and pale cloud-like hair.
How beautiful. In the way that he’s the color of a bruise and cobwebs, and she likes that about him. Then Shroud does something that surprises even her - she approaches him. “All alone?” as she states the obvious, but waits out his answer and reaction. Something about him is tantalizing and she can’t resist his newness in a way that Shroud - barely a mare - has never shown an interest in babies before. That must make him special.
@[Sophist] ❤️