you're capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares. you feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. see, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.
She should not be here.
She can still hear her mother calling for her.
She imagines her mother choking on her panic, summoning her father, searching for her in the fog.
Perhaps it is because she is half-monster that she feels no fear as she surges through the darkness. Still, she catches her tongue on her fanged teeth and bleeds heavy into the pool of her mouth. She grins and blood drips down her chin. Maybe her mother will smell her and come to collect her, drag her back into the shadows of the redwoods.
She is clumsy still, young. The muscles quiver and her skin, covered in so many scales, shudders with them. She is tired by the time she reaches the forest at the edge of the meadow. She is perhaps too young to be so proud, but there is a haughtiness to her as she plunges through the underbrush, impervious to the thorns that scratch at her sides. She thinks herself invincible with the way she can hiss and spit, the blood that drips from her chin.
It is not yet dark, but the light is as murky here as it is in Taiga. She has no control over the way her vision shifts from that of a normal horse to that of a serpent, so that forms take shape in brilliant colors in the shadows that surround her.
Even still, she smells him before she sees him. He reeks of blood, too. And she grins that bloody grin and moves quietly through the shadows toward him. When she is close enough, her vision shifts back to that of a horse and she sees then that he has no eyes. Instead, horns curl away from his skull and she cannot tell if she is repulsed or delighted by the strangeness of him.
Her steps shake with the effort it takes to keep quiet until she is upon him and she touches her scaled nose against his shoulder, hisses, “boo.”
