11-24-2020, 10:12 PM
Sintra’s screaming reaches fever pitch. The world goes from the black of sleep to much too bright, white, and red, and one side of it lurches forward strangely before a sickening snap turns out the lights entirely. The other eye flies open, rolling, and the girl scrambles in the dirt, her small hooves thudding against something she cannot see, hidden in the darkness to her left. It’s bewildering, terrifying, and her breath comes in fast, shuddering chuffs while she tries to pull her wayward feet beneath her.
Whatever is next to her grunts and hisses. Feathers brush her flank and the girl squeals and kicks out at it a second time, finally rocking up onto numb hooves in time for a bit of the blindness to separate itself and stop her dead. She twists her neck awkwardly to find him in her sight and winces as her brow, creased with concentration, pulls at the torn skin of her empty eye socket. The creature looks so like the Guardian on the Mountain that it makes her stomach turn.
Why would he come after her?
The child shivers and tries to step back, but her long traitorous legs tangle together and she falls in a pile against the wet, feathered lump that remains of her mauler. She shrieks again and tries to throw herself backward, fore-hooves striking furiously at the root-shredded carcass, bile burning the back of her throat.
“I don’t like this game anymore!”
Her black cheeks are darkened further with tears and blood that dash against the translucent skin of her breast where her heart beats rapid-fire and visible between the bones. She has not noticed this change yet – this transparency had always lurked beneath the black down of her baby coat, a coat ripped away somehow in the dream of the after-life and leaving her strange. The Guardian offers her herbs for her pain but she barely hears him over the rush of her pulse in her small ears, barely notices the blood dripping from his mouth with her working eye shut tight against the light of day, against the sight of roots tearing birds apart and feeding them to her gothic savior, and the other, swollen, bleeding, sightless.
“I want my Mom,” she whispers softly, forlornly, into her blood-spattered chest.
Whatever is next to her grunts and hisses. Feathers brush her flank and the girl squeals and kicks out at it a second time, finally rocking up onto numb hooves in time for a bit of the blindness to separate itself and stop her dead. She twists her neck awkwardly to find him in her sight and winces as her brow, creased with concentration, pulls at the torn skin of her empty eye socket. The creature looks so like the Guardian on the Mountain that it makes her stomach turn.
Why would he come after her?
The child shivers and tries to step back, but her long traitorous legs tangle together and she falls in a pile against the wet, feathered lump that remains of her mauler. She shrieks again and tries to throw herself backward, fore-hooves striking furiously at the root-shredded carcass, bile burning the back of her throat.
“I don’t like this game anymore!”
Her black cheeks are darkened further with tears and blood that dash against the translucent skin of her breast where her heart beats rapid-fire and visible between the bones. She has not noticed this change yet – this transparency had always lurked beneath the black down of her baby coat, a coat ripped away somehow in the dream of the after-life and leaving her strange. The Guardian offers her herbs for her pain but she barely hears him over the rush of her pulse in her small ears, barely notices the blood dripping from his mouth with her working eye shut tight against the light of day, against the sight of roots tearing birds apart and feeding them to her gothic savior, and the other, swollen, bleeding, sightless.
“I want my Mom,” she whispers softly, forlornly, into her blood-spattered chest.
Sintra
It was so clear to me, that it was almost invisible
@[wilt]