03-12-2022, 10:25 PM
THE ONLY THING TO FEAR
The Child watches.
It is an ugly thing, horrible. Not the beast itself, whose black scales gleam dark and bright at once like the wide empty gloss of her own near-black eyes. No, it is not the snake that is terrible but the Hunger and the violence of its feasting. Bone and sinew crack and blood pulses from the deer's nostrils and mouth, cherry bright, like holly berries, where it drips to the snowy earth. Still, the Child watches.
She does not flinch or tremble, no. Not her, not the Everchild of Pangea. Soot still clings to the nearly-transparent curls of her tail, the ashes of her own body, burnt to dust and cinder, and she steps into the dappled light curious, drawing noisy, deep draughts of air through delicate nostrils. Fear. She feels it, but not like the Others. It is hunger needing to be fed, parched soil begging for rain, and she is the storm.
The doe had been afraid. It was what drew the filly in closer to her, the taste of that fear, the shape of it screaming unformed in the depths of the cervid's mind. She had given the nightmare shape as a Medium gives ghosts a voice, and the blood is cherry bright, like holly berries, where it splashed across her snowy breast.
What do world-eating snakes fear? Do they fear empty little children with dark eyes, as her mother did? Do they fear claws or beaks or red-eyed grey stallion-gods? Perhaps an endless winter; she has never been The Cold before. What is the shape of such a thing? Hunger stirs her eager bones, too, the Magic woven into them yearns to take a different shape. It is something they have in common, perhaps, the Child and the Beast.
@Obscene I wanted to write, but I didn't want to write anyone with a personality, or anyone who owes a post already, apparently