The red woman presses her lips to the black boy’s brow and exhales, blowing his wispy forelock. She trances up and down his bridge, and then the the edge of his jaw. Up and around, and finally stops on the emptied space above his cheekbone, feeling around the leathery hollow with her flexible, soft lip. He flares, pulling in the scent of pine and horsehair, the musk of her flesh and her breath. Familiar and comfortable; her side is all he has known. So very alike to his own, it feels as gracious and homely as the ribs he had grown in.

He moves his head towards, just as she pulls away, seeking the reassurance of her touch. “Go,” she mutters close to his ear, then she moves away, like two planets separating from each other's atmospheres. But she is larger, and so she poaches his oxygen and leaves him reeling.

“Come on, brother!” He turns his empty head towards the sound, turning back once more where mother had been to steel himself before reaching out his soft, black muzzle, finding the crook of sister’s blue back. “Follow me!” He keeps himself pressed against the sweeping of her young hips, his ears twisting nervously as she hums and guides him from the border of their piney home and into the beyond.

The unknown.
So deeply unknown.
It is a long walk, trying the fibers of his trust and calm, and by the time the pair come to a stop in the meadow’s center, he is worn thin. 
“We’re here, brother.”
“W-w-where?” He pulls in air to test, but it is utterly unfamiliar.
“Where the big horses go!” She says jovially, and then she skips away to revel in the rebelliousness of it.
“Sister?” He sqwaks, his ears pitched forward apprehensively.
“It’s fine, brother! I’m here.” Her voice is more distant, calling over the belly-high sway of tallgrass.

He takes a tentative step forward, the toe of his hoof catching in a pit in the dry earth, stumbling the black colt. “Sister!?” He breathes in as panic takes him like a wild gale takes a songbird. He steps forward again, this time more heedless, rolling his ankle on a stone, staggering him to his knees. The colt winches, his breath labouring as he tries to right himself, “ahhh… Sister?” He does not catch her response, anything she might have said as she rushed to him is drowned out by a swell of immense sound in his ears. Then light…

Bright, clean, cold, confusing light. He shuts his eyelids tight, jerking his head down and away from the glint. He hears a high pitched scream, and it rings in his ears like nothing he has ever heard before. Sharp and loud, and agitating. He shakes his head, trying to push the rush of senses away from him–reaching for his simple darkness. But it only grows as the screams continue to assail his eardrums and from deep behind his ribs he pulls a mighty rumble.

He means to say be quiet. 
It is a heaving roar–nothing compared to what he will be capable of in the years to come, and it scares them both. 
The blue girl falls silent, quivering and rearing back. 
The tiger’s ears pin, and his tails curls around his striped belly and up his side. He crouches, looking down at the large paws pressed into the dirt, kneading his claws in and out of his toes.

He turns his round, orange eyes back to sister, but she is yards away now, her wide eyes projecting a panic he understands.

And something about it is enticing, causing him to roll his muscled shoulders back.
This, he does not understand.

The blue girl is gone. That roar echoing in her ears. Running and running. Her heart is pounding, stretching the limits of her arteries and veins – oxygen depletion, she cannot suck in enough air to please her whining lungs. Her long legs ache, but she runs all the same. When she reaches the pinewoods and calls for mother, her head is swimming and she stumbles over every needle and stone.

‘Brother...’ She tells the red woman what she has seen. The impossible thing she has seen.
Aurane closes her eyes tight and leans her head back, her lip quivering. And then she touches the girl on her forehead gently, kissing the whorl in the middle.

‘Good,’ she whispers. It shivers over the girl’s forelock and she leans into it, her eyes closing too...

The tiger rounds his back. Curling in on himself. 
He blinks. His eyes are bright and wide. When they open, they reveal enormously dilated pupils – fear. His tail coils tight ‘round his body, the end flicking against his inner thigh agitatedly. His paws worry in the dust, they are strange and sensitive. They are dangerous and untried – he unsheathes his claws and stares at them, scared of their potential because he has not yet recognized it as his own. He imagines his own haunches shred to the bone when he sees them, and he rakes one across the earth, flinching back from the angry furrows he leaves at his feet.

He does not know this second body. He feels petrified in its skin, stiffened and stuck in one place, bombarded with sight and higher frequencies of sound. 
He has felt it, from time to time, just never understood it. Thought it just funny feelings and foolish games. The phantom way his shoulders sometimes seem to narrow and roll as he walks, powerful and athletic. In the way he often catches himself listening to those ravens rustle their wings, trying to track them with his eyeless head, licking his lips as he buys into the make-pretend. It makes sister giggle and call him ‘silly’, and he agrees that he must be. So he nibbles on grass and gulps mother’s milk, and forgets the curious appetite.

But, when he dreams, fitful and sweaty, of meaty things…

The grass swishes and crinkles, he cranes his head to peer over the islands of bromegrass, just enough to see her bobbing over them like a bouy in water. He sinks back down, his lips pulled back from his teeth, snarling quietly. He should not be scared of her. Somewhere he knows it. He feels encouraged to straighten his spine. To let loose the tightened spring of his haunches. He lifts a little taller, spitting between his bared, predator's dentition. But when she circles he lowers on stiff legs, spinning around on his heels to keep her in sight. Cornered.

He should not be afraid of her. But he is just afraid.
It is tiring. He lowers to his belly, keeping his feet squarely under him, his head lolling back and he roars again, a little weaker this time. A little more hapless in the way it stays on his tongue and reverberates mournfully. He realizes, suddenly, that he does not know how to get back.

He blinks. His eyes bright and plaintive. ‘I am stuck,’ he chirps.