I am a guide to the labyrinth - any.

[sinew]

She jerks awake; grains of sand shiver around her knees at each snorting breath that comes from where the press of her nose lies against them - she has been dreaming again and this time, he came for her, big and boar-tusked like always and for the first time, she had tasted the coppery taste of fear in her mouth before jerking awake. That was close, she thinks; little pants and gasps crowd her throat but she swallows them back down and rises up from her small bed of sun-hot sand at the foot of a large dune into whose shadow she has been cast. Her nap was fitful and frightening and she cannot shake the memory of it this time like she has been able to do all other times - he nearly had her! Even her ears still ring with that indescribably sharp high bone-whistle of his that came out of the mishmash of sinew and bone at his throat rather than his mouth - that had stayed drawn tight in a rictus-grin of teeth that did not scare her half as much as the tusks that poked out of his cheeks, garish and unnatural. Sinew, brave and rebellious filly that she is, does not seek the comfort of her dam’s side; instead, she finds one of the many trails that lead away from the desert of her beginning (she knows that she has been born before, is older even than her mother is though surely that cannot be but Sinew is the very grit and gristle contained in the spark of life, and there are things that come to her in dreams of lives before that might have been hers or another’s) and towards a more communal place - one that she has yet to visit though she has tarried a time or two in the forest close to it, but she veers away from the trees and their cloistered dark closeness (that forest holds the secret of eyes gone gold and other darknesses and is the cause for the strange little smile on her lips) and opts for the openness of the tallgrass meadow that tickles her belly at each step. The tiny overo is not long behind the screams and the roar that ensues that pulls at her primitively, an instinctual tug of warning that she ignores out of her own brave stupidity. Her head swings in the direction of a fleeing blue girl and the striped cat crouching low and lower in the tallgrass. His eyes pull her in, mesmeric and orange, and Sinew cannot help but go towards what instinct says to flee from. “My, what sharp claws you have…” she murmurs, circling him warily or so it would seem but there are no signs of fright in her look or stance, no hope that her flesh is found thin and unappetizing to him because Sinew is not afraid of the tiger in their midst though she should be. “My, what orange eyes you have…” and she pokes her face close to his, all the better to see him with though she is dancing on her toes, eager to leap back if he swipes a nasty paw at her. “So beautiful,” she tells him sweetly.