The tolling of the bells... ROUND I

[Ribcage]

The red woman presses her lips to the black boy’s brow. And exhales, blowing his wispy forelock with hot, heavy breath. She trances down his bridge and then the the edge of his jaw. Up and around, and finally stops on the emptied space above his cheekbone, feeling around the leathery hollow with her flexible, soft lip.

He breathes. Pulling in the scent of pine and horsehair, the musk of her flesh and her breath. Familiar and comfortable. He cannot conceive of anything but her (but her and sister); the halls of iron pine trees and fire, and the thrum of that underground heart are still, to him, noises and smells that he cannot understand. Not in the way that many others can, rooted by the curves and colours of their form. The pull of wind through grey-green needles, the caw of ravens in the still air; the hushed words of horses, face-less in his everlasting black. They only muddle his mind, and so he stays by her and lets her fill him with her soft coos and promises.

He moves his head towards, as she pulls away. Seeking the reassurance of her touch.

Her side is all he has known. So very self-same to his own, that they feel as gracious and homely as the ribs he had grown in. He could not know, sightless and oh-so tender, that his mother (their mother) had come to bloodshed in his defense. Warding off the fangs that stalk in the hinterlands, giving them chase from her defenseless and hastily hidden colt. 
Given something of herself to allow him his life.

So very unlike Crone, indeed. And yet he had been found alive, by the red sister-mother – in blood and without her. It had been something of a great disappointment to Aurane, but as she tested the spring in his ribs under the agitated weight of her hoof, he had turned and revealed to her the gross incompleteness of his face.
She had fallen for him. ‘Much more special than her, dear boy.’

But he likes sister. When he can pry himself from mother, or is pushed away by the gnash of her teeth when they get too rowdy (a sudden sting he cannot ready himself for – sister likes to take the brunt of it – for him, she says), he presses his nose to her and lets the girl guide him through their home.

He breathes in. Snaking out his muzzle, searching for the warm, red bulge of her shoulder or belly.
He breathes in. And panic takes him like a wild gale takes a songbird.
Rings fill his ear, drowning out the pulse of that heartbeat and the wind through those pines.

And silence. As stark and his darkness.
But he knows nothingness intimately, and so he is calmer in the absence of sound as he is in the unsurness of that most unnatural knell.

“Mother…? Sister?”

‘Behold! The end of the world is nigh!’ He flinches, taking an unsteady step forward, feeling the ground in front of him with a cautious hoof. He turns his little black head, tilting this way and that, ears flicking to find the reverberation of that voice... so uncanny and everywhere at once. He moves, step by tiny step, catching a hoof in a pock in the earth and scuffing his knobbly knees. 
He pulls in scent. And the mingle of horsehair comes to him in the otherwise stale stillness. “Hello?”

He cannot see the lamb. He is spared that strange hallucination (if it is – it must be). But he can feel it, the seer of its many-eyes before it is gone to them all at once. The black colt stumbles into flesh: black and white, and blueish, and red and green and more. Until finally he scents the sweetness of pine and home, and brushes his nose across Weaver’s hide lightly. Not sister. Not mother. But safety.

‘You are the chosen ones. Will you accept your fate?’

He shivers, ‘one day, you’ll be so big and strong and you’ll rip from the bellies of my enemies the coils of their insides. Sweet boy.’ “I know my fate...” he whispers, softly, rolling his shoulder blades and feeling the duality beneath them. Somewhere.