She had woken up again at the river as if she had never gone to the mountain at all, and she had leaped to her small feet with a startled gasp, terrified it was starting again, that it would end with her mother tearing the skin from her body again and the stumbling gallop through the forest.
"Sintra?"
Her mother's voice seemed so normal, calling out clear at the sound of her daughter rousing in the dark. The child had shuddered at the sound of it.
"It was just a nightmare Sintra."
The words rekindled the panic that wrung her young heart. Without waiting, the girl bolted, unseeing, heedless of direction or the deep river, intent only on escaping her monster that is not her mother, and the forest at their backs. No lullaby follows her, only the sound of her splashing and sputtering and choking when the river swallows her, too swollen with frigid snowmelt for the filly to cross. She was swept away, too deafened by the river's roaring to notice the desperate cries of her mother's attempts to save her.
The blackness followed soon after, a strange, thick, fuzzy blackness that had no business being in the middle of the cold river.
When morning comes at last, peeling away the night, the sun finds her lying still as death near the water's edge. The vultures have found her, too. They wheel and pitch in the sky above, unsure of what their eyes tell them. Only one of their bunch has braved the low-cropped grass where the meadow runs towards the river, only one struts closer to the carcass gleaming in the early dawn and turns its featherless head this way and that. The scent says the meat is still fresh (still living, in fact, but he is not very picky about that as long as the animal is down and immobile, it is enough for him,) but his eyes give a stranger story, bones already picked clean. No, not quite, because when he looks closer, he can see the faint colors that shift across the skin of her belly.
It is confusing, yes, but he and his brothers are hungry. Someone must take the first try. Wings wide, he hops to the dark head still full of normal flesh, where the foal's faint breath makes her nostrils tremble, and the nightmares of the nearly-dead set her eyes to rolling beneath the black curtain of her eyelids. His beak is not strong enough to tear through the tough skin over her abdomen, but it is precise enough to pierce through her lowered lid and tear out the spinning violet eye.
A scream splits the silence of the spring morning.
-------
@[Jassal] this is not where i meant this post to go...
"Sintra?"
Her mother's voice seemed so normal, calling out clear at the sound of her daughter rousing in the dark. The child had shuddered at the sound of it.
"It was just a nightmare Sintra."
The words rekindled the panic that wrung her young heart. Without waiting, the girl bolted, unseeing, heedless of direction or the deep river, intent only on escaping her monster that is not her mother, and the forest at their backs. No lullaby follows her, only the sound of her splashing and sputtering and choking when the river swallows her, too swollen with frigid snowmelt for the filly to cross. She was swept away, too deafened by the river's roaring to notice the desperate cries of her mother's attempts to save her.
The blackness followed soon after, a strange, thick, fuzzy blackness that had no business being in the middle of the cold river.
When morning comes at last, peeling away the night, the sun finds her lying still as death near the water's edge. The vultures have found her, too. They wheel and pitch in the sky above, unsure of what their eyes tell them. Only one of their bunch has braved the low-cropped grass where the meadow runs towards the river, only one struts closer to the carcass gleaming in the early dawn and turns its featherless head this way and that. The scent says the meat is still fresh (still living, in fact, but he is not very picky about that as long as the animal is down and immobile, it is enough for him,) but his eyes give a stranger story, bones already picked clean. No, not quite, because when he looks closer, he can see the faint colors that shift across the skin of her belly.
It is confusing, yes, but he and his brothers are hungry. Someone must take the first try. Wings wide, he hops to the dark head still full of normal flesh, where the foal's faint breath makes her nostrils tremble, and the nightmares of the nearly-dead set her eyes to rolling beneath the black curtain of her eyelids. His beak is not strong enough to tear through the tough skin over her abdomen, but it is precise enough to pierce through her lowered lid and tear out the spinning violet eye.
A scream splits the silence of the spring morning.
-------
@[Jassal] this is not where i meant this post to go...