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+---- Thread: Don't run from a coming storm cause you can't keep the storm from comin' // Breckin, (/showthread.php?tid=26553)
Don't run from a coming storm cause you can't keep the storm from comin' // Breckin, - Sabra - 04-10-2020
I am in no hurry.
The land is ripe with summer, fat days, filling days, where the sun is out early and lasts late into the evening. I have a place to be, and for the time-being it's enough just to know that. The humid air by the river is thick with scents of other horses and boggy, mossy earth. Mosquitoes swarm above stagnant patches of slow-moving water and buzz ceaselessly around my head, but they do an alright job of drowning out the voices in my head.
It has taken me days of practice to not flinch at every hateful whisper, to move with slow deliberation and not catch the spear in my breast on every bush and rock as I turn. It is a fine balancing act I have in progress now. My steps are a calculated dance out of necessity now, elegance in fear of more pain. But I am getting the hang of it, of browsing from tall bushes like the deer do, or else reaching very carefully to the side to reach grass. Frustrating work, but it's paying off. I'm no longer quiet as skeletal. Muscle is filling my bones again, though I'm still thin, I no longer look frightening.
In the heat of the sun I doze by the river's edge, the air moving across its surface cooler than the air away from it. It's quiet, as though even the birds and the cicadas are too hot to scream. I can't blame them. It's only in the shade of the long rooted cypress I find myself cool enough to be comfortable. Still, it's preferable to the ice of winter. There's no solace when snow hits the ground for a desert born creature like me. I'll take muggy heat over deep winter any time.
I try not to dwell on what others think when they see me. Shining, glittering in the sun, haunted and pierced. Like a cracked gemstone pulled out for the first time in years, I know I look more than a little deranged with my matted mane and bloody chest. How odd it is then that I feel saner than I have in ages.
@[Breckin] @[Linnaea]
RE: Don't run from a coming storm cause you can't keep the storm from comin' // Breckin, - Breckin - 05-06-2020
Another lonesome summer day had come and started its descent into passing.
The tallest point of the sun’s path had marked itself across her, staining the white of her speckled coat a shade or two darker as Breckin curved this way and that around the sparsening trees the lined the River’s edge. The breaks in the sunlight were well-welcomed and tempered the heat enough to make the day still enjoyable, though the twitch in her limbs that so chronically lusted after movement kept her from staying put long enough to rid her slender body entirely of the sweat that drenched her. There would always be time for a well-deserved rest later on, and by later on she very well already knew that she’d never be entirely well deserving of that luxury. Not in light of the path she was currently endeavoring.
Rounding a broad bend where the river toppled over itself, stirring itself white against the break of the scattered boulders, she found the trunk of a large cypress blocking the way. Tentatively, she moved sideways to pass it, careful of what may lie unseen on the other side of its wide span. The other horses on the further side seemed to be shooting a strange glance in the sentinel’s general direction, and their uneasiness leeched into her as she hesitantly turned to look where they had been.
An opalescent lady rested beneath the tree’s outstretched boughs, and an obvious show of surprise warps the lines of her brittle face, unseeing of what the significant deal was to the observers that held their distance. Braving a few steps further, the inquisitive mare stops mid-step when that oddly bent branch finally she’d noticed a moment ago finally comes into better view. Initially, she’d merely swept the odd angle off as a trick of the summer’s heat and nothing more than a relfective illusion. But how strangely and severely she had been so mistaken.
“Oh, holy - ! Wow, did….did that just happen?”, Breckin exclaimed when she finally found her voice, coming to a stop just in front of the other woman, ”Because if so, I must commend you, you really are doing a fantastic job of staying calm.” Immediately she hated herself for not catching her slipping tongue and she laughs nervously in a dumb response to her sudden flare of anxiety. Well, this was going positively swimmingly. With a deep breath, she steadied herself before anything else so seemingly insensitive could slip through her dark lips. She might’ve been confused and indifferent in a general frame of reference lately, but she was not heartless. “I am so sorry, that was just a lot to take in all of a sudden. Do you need help?
@[Sabra]
RE: Don't run from a coming storm cause you can't keep the storm from comin' // Breckin, - Sabra - 05-06-2020
I am not expecting them to be brave enough to approach, and for the most part I am right. The one who comes around the bend did not know I stood here, her eyes seemed more occupied by the stares of the nearby others. Once her eyes do land on me, the sequence of events are one I've come to find predictable. The shock, the nausea, the concern.
It turns my stomach.
The spotted mare seems to have lost control of her tongue, eyes wide and staring. I let her finish, expression going darker longer she talks. By the time she's finished, I look like a flat headed snake just after its been stepped on by an unwary colt.
My ice blue eyes hold her gaze for a long moment, the blood dripping from my chest the only sound. After a beat, I let the silence break, but only just. My voice is soft as velvet, and no less dark. "I do not need help," I burred, a skeleton carved from crystal and flame before her. I do need help, though. Dearly, desperately, I do, but I have stopped believing that I can be helped. I stand on my pride because it's the only thing I have left.
My smile, a cutthroat thing, breaks my face sharply. My head tilts like a birds, scanning the spotted and speckled mare. Soft thing, sweet thing. "Do you need help?" I ask softly, my tone no sort of promise that help will be offered. I step close, too close to be polite. Voices echo in my mind, in my ears. Whispers of rage and doubt, and they tell me she is not to be trusted. None of them are. I will devour them all, for breaking me so.
@[Breckin]