It's in my blood, it's in my water - Jen pony

[Hoarfrost]

A WHITE BLANK PAGE AND A SWELLING RAGE, RAGE
YOU DID NOT THINK WHEN YOU SENT ME TO THE BRINK, TO THE BRINK

He keeps to the meadow and forest, not knowing where else to go, drawing puzzled and alarmed ogling. 

The way many keep their distance makes him sad, he is filled with the strangest urges to seek out contact with them—he is beginning, however, to recognize the lines and curves of their body language. He finds he grasps this better than any spoken tongue he has ever heard on his wanderings. There is a chaotic, old pool in his gut that the Old God had not forgotten to fill when he fleshed and blooded Hoarfrost.

Instinct. So different from the still and thoughtless eons he had lived previous, beholden to no such itching and aching.

Camaraderie. Something he had never realized he shared with his brother peaks until the moment he set eyes on them and knew that they were his kind. By then, he could not speak their silent, meaningless language, nor read their toneless, inanimate bodies. He was separate from their nature. He was animal, and they were formations of an active, pubescent earth.

Emotion. This had been the first lesson the Old God taught him. It had hurt, but the hurt had found strange places to hide while his animal’s mind shook the cobwebs loose. It springs out in moments of unbearable pressure—like a volcano unable to contain its molten bloodstream. He cries, mostly, when he is alone and he remembers his animals. Other times, he finds it easier to destroy. It is mindless and blank and resembles best the nothingness that had come before the everything.

Sometimes, the giant longs for it. But all too quickly the blood pumps from his heart and fills his veins and his skin tingles and he feels. Guilt comes to pass, contemplative and heavy.

He cannot walk carefully here, though he tries. Young trees bend as he passes by and over them; old, feeble ones creak and moan their complaints and those terminal crack and fall. Squirrels jump from bough to bough, chittering angrily after him, jerking their tails indignantly. “Sorry, animal,” he rumbles and frowns, planting each hoof with a delicate thud.

Sometimes, it is easier to be still again. He breaths, slow and groaning, the dull thumping of his heartbeat filling the quiet air around him.

THE FROST GIANT

PHOTOGRAPHY © STEINAR ENGELAND

@[jenger]