Anhedonia was a product of the small grouping of trees she’d called home for the last five years. What she knew of others was gathered primarily through observation, from watching silently through branches and listening to conversations meant to be private. If some pair of horses retired to the trees for privacy they quickly left – she looked more creature than horse, all scars and ash.
She spent her days around creatures that looked like her and spoke like her and fought like her. Their blood was the same color. They could breathe the same air.
But she was other.
In silence she always lapsed in to the white and almost imperceptible drone of the earth, imagined solar radiation. She could close her eyes and forget anything else in the metronomic melody of expansion, stars devouring their cores in the centuries-long race to eventuality. Here she often imagined things beyond comprehension, a mind that curled in and out on itself a thousand times over when she was alone, thoughts connected with the turning ease of the removed. When she left the silence she was surrounded by billions and yet alone in a way that had no resolution, sitting cross-legged on the other side of a gulf created not by her isolation or deformity, but by a fundamental differing of biology and time.
It was a thing she couldn’t even explain to herself, but she felt caged by a million lightyears of galaxy to roam. Not enough.
And yet when she leaves the safety of her trees at night, she sees things, like a soft smile widening to crawl towards either side of a head until the whole thing had melted backwards, opening to a soft release of green and blue stardust, flecks of light dancing in swirling smoke as he disintegrated in to a perfect replication of the beautiful Orixon Nebula.
When she blinked it was gone.
The meadow was quiet for the evening and she lowered her head to the last of the snow, pushing it aside with her muzzle in an attempt to get to what tender, spring grass she could find beneath.
Anhedonia
i've grown familiar with villains that live in my head
they beg me to write them so they'll never die when i'm dead