I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray


“Shhh,” he spits between tight lips.
And though she is not here, he thinks he can hear her voice echoing in his greathall of bony birch trees; her scent—
(the one he knew, that is: horsehair, and blood, in even mixture)
His nostrils flare, and he pulls in strong draughts of cold air. Spring (dirty and rotten, faintly nauseating), and that musk of her death. Blood. Horsehair. Maybe whatever bone smells like. He spins around, shifting out of sight. “Where are you?” he mutters, spittle draping over his quivering lip.
“Where are you!”
He hears the scraping of something on earth and the upturn of a stone and he launches himself forward. He thinks he can see something black and half-faced, but shadows rush in around the spaces between pines and naked wood and he thinks, maybe, he can see nothing at all. “Come here, woman!” He whips through the forest, dodging frozen trees and puddles of brown slush, shifting from sight and unseen—uncontrolled, he thinks. Uncontrolled, for the first time in a long time. This angers him.
He does not lose control.

He did not fall through ice and snow and space (and snow bear country) just to devolve. 
—to be be undone by some uppity, clingy, dead bitch.

The forest blows by him. A blur of black and steely green, brown and grey-blue light. And then the open: silvery and swaying, wetted down by spring. He spills into the Meadow and runs until the air stings his lungs and is too cold to fill up on, expelled before it hits the back of his throat in a heavy, white cough. Until his thigh and shoulder aches so deeply that he stumbles, spraying meltwater up his knees and across his heaving belly. “Bitch,” he breaths, closing his eyes tight. 
He cannot hear her anymore.
But he can hear something.

Inhales and exhales. Ribs expanding and depressing, Forceful breathing, and one heavy, sustained moan. His lip curls and he flickers out of sight, turning towards the sound. 

In a crook, damp and unprotected, she glances over her her skin and bones, dropping her head back down in exhaustion.
A smell like old blood, tissue and fluid… Gold and pale off-white. He squints, his gut clenching, but he sees no wings folding over her hips. “But I know you.” the palomino whispers, taking a few steps forwards. “Hey!” he tests. And she does not react to him (as he knew she would not) but shifts to try and get up to her feet and tend to her newborn. 

“Such a shame,” he murmurs. She lifts up to her knees, then to her feet. She is sway-backed and thin, he snorts in disgust, her udders painfully out of place on her hard, aged body. “This is a mercy.”

He breaths deep, stepping over the damp, red mound and rearing into the air, angling his headgear like a ram in combat. Eggshell-like. Crack. 
Blood stains the whites of her wide eyes until they too are indescribable from the rest—jellied and strange. Remade and refashioned, he molds her like a careful artist.
Like a god.


POLLOCK
Lone Artist and Phina's

The grand highway
is crowded w/ lovers & searchers 
& leavers so eager to please & forget.

‘Stupid. Bitch.’ He flinches, his head jerking up. For a moment he cannot unwind his own thoughts from the venomous hiss and he wonders what he had been thinking about. (Dreaming about?) It is not often he lets thoughts enter him uninvited. He has become adept at filtering them, selecting them and blotting out the rest like a shield against what would be an unbearable din otherwise. 
His gut churns and he shifts uneasily.
He blinks, hoping to find his eyes heavy and full of sleep. But he has been awake this whole time, perhaps drifting off a bit, but mostly standing and breathing. Letting himself think in utter silence where he can shed the rigid bones of his careful restraint.

Night is a free place for him. Where, undercover and alone, he can let guilt or jealousy or anger flood him and lift his hackles. Where he can think unruly thoughts and let them simmer under his blue surface, roiling like a night ocean. Where he can act on them... if ever need be.
And they would be none the wiser.

‘...all your fault.’ Chessur's brow furrows, and his shakes his head, trying to push away the immense pressure filling his ears. Hatred. Boiled down and concentrated; a mighty conflagration, burning his eardrums. It is powerful, angry and frightened, for a second his heart flutters because the purity of it is thrilling. ‘Look at me!’ The crisp air catches in his throat and he turns, bolting—

...thoughts do not orient him like a call in the night would. They rattle in his skull, like the echoes in a cave.
But he knows where to go.

“Still as dark a place as ever.” He tries to mask his hasty breathing, craning his neck to try and peak around him.

The palomino turns his head slightly. He knows the voice. “Get out of my head, little brother.” It is a warning shot across the bow, because he knows better. That line has been drawn between them before.

The blue stallion sighs, moving to stand rib to rib with Pollock, looking down at the smear of blood and shards of skull bone and the empty heap of tissue and horsehair. Both men can feel the squirm of distaste in the space between their bellies like the unsettling crawl of worms. “She raised me, you know, Pollock,” he says, with not nearly enough anguish in his voice. He searches her for recognition but more than just disfigurement, she is old and bent-backed.
“Hm. Did you know she was deaf?” he watches blood from that pulp of gold and grass fill fissures in the still frozen earth, stepping back and away from its slow encroachment towards his two-toed hooves. The curve of his great horns are crusted with blood, pieces of nondescript viscera hooked on the ridges; his forehead and bridge are splattered like an expressionist canvas, drips slinking down his cheek and brow. 
Chessur's lip curls and he turns to look at Pollock, the muscles in his jaw flexing in anger. 
‘Don’t even think about it, little brother. You'd be fucked, you know that. And I’d rather not right now.’ The palomino turns to walk away, his dirty wing dragging through, like a paint brush picking up red.

“What about this?”
Pollock stops, shuttering his eyes tight and groaning at the heaviness gathering in his bad limbs and the dull ache behind his eyes. And at the inanity. But, Chessur was always the softest one.

His silence is enough, as are his irritated thoughts, and the blue stallion sighs, “I may be able to find someone to take care of it...”

He holds his breath, listening to the dull drag of Pollock's wing and the soft sound of his hooves scraping wearily, splashing through meltwater. He glances over his hip to make sure (to the best of his ability—one can never be sure) that his brother is gone.
He exhales. “Come then. No reason to stay here any longer. She’s no use to you now.”

He waits for as long as it takes, watching the first staggered steps of something as utterly wretched as he had been, once. 
When the boy is up, starved for colostrum and nudging the woman's heavy thigh, the blue stallion draws him from her side. He knows he is advantaged by the sweetness of the colt’s confusion and malleability; he is spared any great sadness, because his baby thoughts are garbled and bubbly, if a bit woeful as her golden form disappears behind them and he presses his ruddy nose into the blue stallion's groin instead, concerned only with searching for his first taste of mother's milk. 

He will not remember this. That is a gift. Once someone cleans the crust of dry blood from his shoulders and hips and belly, it will be gone forever. 
He steers him out of the Forest and past the Field and the Playground, emptied in the dawn. Skirting the borders of the Dale, and up through the passages, cut in the stone mountainsides by wind and rain, and into the familiar fold of the Ridge, searching the sparkling crags for someone with a better maternal instinct than he.

------------------------------------
Great-great-great-grandmother of Lilin


CHESSUR
Trashlip and Phina's