A... lure? The starred girl pauses, letting the thought tumble through her mind like a fishscale lost in the eddies of a wild river, sparkling bright and too small to ever settle. Shipka is guileless and sincere and unused to the deceit that her companion suggests. A lie, he means, and she finds nothing in his voice or his expression to say that she shouldn't believe him, but she doesn't want to. Her heart thuds in her chest like a hammer, like a fist, and if she had time, she might wonder if he can see the outline of it pressing against her skin, but her attention is taken up by something - someone - staggering towards them.

What sort of creature could cause wounds like that?

The creature limps closer. Its progress is slow, hampered by massive injuries, but its keening cries fill her ears, snag at her, drawing her away from the gold stallion's side, and this time she doesn't pause but bounds forward too quickly to hear the irony in his voice. She's too quick, this time, to catch his laugh, to hear his words, because the thing shrieks and Shipka is running to it, and when it  lurches forward, the girl is there, catching up the full weight of it on slim shoulders.

And gods, but it's heavy.

So heavy.

The creature's entire weight is falling across her back and Shipka falters, a foreleg curling unbidden.

"Please," her voice is a gasp under the strain, "you have to stand, I- I can't hold you up, I-"

Her bright eyes fall on the face of the creature, and finds no face. The shape is horse-like, but there are no eyes, only melting flesh and flashes of bone underneath. Her stomach turns and her words die away. She's no healer, and if she were, she thinks the destruction wrought on this strange body would burn her up like dry switchgrass in a wildfire. The jagged, broken edge of the beast's exposed sternum digs at her side and she dares not look to see what is dripping onto her back, or whether the burning sensation there is real. Surely not, she thinks, it's only her imagination, like the ice-cold fear that suddenly flares up her spine when she realizes it's not alive.

The thing swings that vaguely equine head around as if to regard her with its eyeless face and Shipka shudders. There is no mouth but harsh laughter jangles noisily in her head like broken glass, flooding her vision with red and black and white, and when she tries to pull away, it moves with her, its sloughing flesh adhering to her skin, its bones shifting, cracking, as if to pull her inside the tarry cavern of its rotten innards.

"No."

The stars here slip away from her when she reaches for them, defiant, cold, they aren't her stars and care nothing for her, care nothing for fools that run willingly into the embrace of the Eaters. There's only her and... and... Her gaze finds her companion's and in an odd moment of calm, it occurs to her that she is going to die on an adventure she agreed to go on with a total stranger. Was this the plan all along?

She has always been so, so naive.

The moment of clarity ends. Laughter rattles through her bones as the creature stretches its skin around her, she even smiles herself, an empty, manic, smile that doesn't touch her eyes which are filling with horror instead. The corners of her mouth stretch back too far, into a grin bigger than she could manage on her own, but the magic of the creature absorbing her holds her in a painful rictus, turning her head to the stallion that runs to her aid. What hubris he has, the little, insignificant, wretch. What a fool, to think he can pluck prey from Our belly, she thinks in thoughts that are not her own voice, but one that makes white fire flash in her eyes.  The laughter feels like it is tearing her bones asunder.

"HahehaHELP-ahahahaheehahaha"

It takes everything she has to break through the psychic link with a single word lost immediately in a fit of giggles that makes her jaws crack. She doesn't feel him touch the still exposed skin of her shoulder, but the way his magic rips her away from the Beast makes her shriek. Fear and anger and and a red flood of pain. Her brain feels like shattered glass. Something solid strikes her feet, strikes her knees and her chest and the breath leaves her body for so long she thinks she might be dead. A feeling like loneliness flares up unexpectedly, emptiness, and if she had the strength to stand, Shipka knows she would find her way back to the hungry thing wailing a hundred miles down the beach.

When the tentacles of its magic begin to wither away the young mare convulses, rolling up with a choking sound, sending the murky sand flying. She leaps to newborn legs and wobbles, sidesteps, clipping her own hooves with a sharp smack and falling against the champagne stallion.

Are you hurt?

"No." She lies, black fluid trickling from her flared nostrils.

"I'm fine."

Her head feels too heavy without the Monster's strength flooding her veins like rancid fat and she lets it hang against him, breath filling lungs that feel half-drowned. That desire to rejoin curls in her brain like a beckoning finger.

"We should go back. Please let's go back. It needs our... our help. It needs help. Our help." Her voice dies away, but she continues to mouth the words.

She doesn't feel the sickening lurch when he drags them back, or when he leaps forward again. She doesn't notice the way the sky is so dark, that the seagrass is wilted and browned by the long night. All Shipka knows when he tears them away from the entity and from the other world is the crushing horror of abject loss that claws at her. This isn't what she'd meant when she asked him to take her back. Not here. The Beast's taunting lure coils in her brain like fire.

No, no, no, no, her soul shrieks, and maybe she does too, she doesn't really know. In the haze of that impossible distance, she's adrift on a sea of anger and hatred and a thousand white-hot emotions she's never known before that make her ears pin back into the galaxy of her mane and make her lash out at him with white teeth bared and snapping. They catch only air though, coming together with an auditory click and sudden confusion. He draws his muzzle away, strange black fluid trickling slow as Death from his nostrils, gleaming and gruesome in the bright light of day, and he asks for forgiveness.

She is not sure what there is to forgive, the sickness in her heart has drained away so abruptly that it leaves her weak-kneed and perplexed. She remembers... No, she isn't sure what she remembers, the ardent need to rejoin with the creature is gone like a nightmare that evaporates on waking. Her sides are slick with sweat and dark, oily, blood, but the disease rages in a different body.

His.

With breath shuddering in lungs that feel half-drowned, she reaches out to him again, more gently than a moment before, brushing faintly freckled lips over the curve of his feverish eye as if with a touch she can take back what he's stolen, but her abilities don't extend so far as his.

"I... I'm not sure what you've done," she thinks he's apologizing for something else, for whatever he's taken from her (and perhaps he is, but they are thinking of different things,) "I'm sure it's not worth apologizing for."

And then, shakily, she grins at him.

"It was probably my fault anyway."

The freckled girl doesn't recoil when he bares his teeth at her, when the forest fire of Sickness rages inside him until the fuel is spent, and when it's finally passed and he asks what she's said she only shakes her head because it doesn't matter.

"You shouldn't have done that," she says, ruefully, brushing her lips against his sweaty cheek, "but thank you."

Shipka's earnest voice belies the worry in her heart that this has all been too simple, though why she feels any misgivings at all, she isn't sure. Maybe it's the way the beach has changed in the time that they've been Elsewhere. The dismal saltgrass wilted and brown, the bones strewn violently, as if the bodies here were ravaged. Looking at the strange destruction wrought on this already ghastly stretch of shore makes her uneasy.

The only relief is that when she calls for the stars, they sing back, even though the cold fire of their light is far away behind the sun, she feels their sparks in her soul. She sighs, turning her attention to the sky, bright and blue with clouds slipping through like smoke, and ponders aloud.

"Were we really gone all night? It doesn't seem like it," she could have lost hours in the darkness of that fever and longing, though, "Oh, look!"

Silver eyes widen and look to the golden stallion, then back to the horizon where the crack that was there no longer shatters the sky.

"It's gone!" her voice is too bright for the deadened land around them, the mutilated bones and the white sand turned rusty with blood, "The crack is gone! That's... We didn't do that, did we?"

Doubt creeps into her voice as she turns to him again. Surely nothing they did was enough to heal the awful grinning wound that had stretched across it, yet what else could explain its disappearance?