places of stilled time; any

[loam]

Eyes open - - Green, as raw emeralds left in the earth; no sparkle, no shine, all hard and dark. Green, as ivy, that chokes the life out of everything it comes across; beautiful, deadly. She feels… strange, but cannot place why for feeling is not strange to her but it seems as if she has just come out of a long, deep sleep in which there was no dreaming. She mutters about blood and bones until her mutterings cease and she tilts her face up experimentally towards a source of light. It looks like she scents the air like a stallion searching for a mare in the throes of her heat but really, she is not. Her lips move but words fail to come out. She has not grown mute in those first few moments, but she feels newborn, swaying and frail until her limbs test their own remembered strength and stretch as she searches still for a thing unnamed. “I…” she says, her voice scratching at her throat with sharp claws of disuse. She shakes her head, the mane curling heavy on her neck beneath the weight of cobwebs and the bits of bracken that refuse to leave it. She looks upon the glade - her glade actually, that same one hidden deep in the heart of the woods in the meadow. There is her scummed over pool where no fish breaks the surface and it lies flat and green, almost furry looking but she knows otherwise and it is her mouth that breaks the stillness of it - she is the unnatural disturbance within nature, and when she pulls back from quenching her thirst, her lips are smeared green with algae. “Hm,” she muses aloud, having no true thought (especially none given to the daughters she has birthed in this same dark place that coughed her up again) as to what she will do or where she will go except out, out into the light perhaps though her eyes smolder briefly at that thought - there is no light for a creature like her, of dirt and worm and whispers of death that lick along her marrow, cracking her bones open with dust. Still small in that thin, sharp, unbeautiful way of the malnourished and lacking, she moves off down a trail that only she knows for it doesn’t exist, grown over with thorns of things that prick and sting. Her sable flesh doesn’t register each scratch in her mind though blood breaks brilliantly against her skin, but it is no matter to Loam, what is a scratch or a few to one like her? She is mechanized now, caught in the repetition of slow ambulatory motion that does not still, even when she skirts the throbbing full heart of the meadow and recognizes none who stand there, then again, she never did all those other times too.