her
Blind and whistling just around the corner
And there's a wind that is whispering something
Strong as hell but not hickory rooted
She sees War rakes furrows across a dappled mare’s back (a feeling she knows well, her own back raked with his teeth), but when he is done with her the mare is gone.
The mare is gone, but the lamb returns.
It moves like silk, otherworldly, and it is the same hypnotic gaze, strange sinuous movements, and she is, as always, entranced.
(The abyss stares back into you.)
Another seal. It feels like a rhythm, now, the pieces shattering, the world gone still in the one subsequent moment, the heartbeat that echoes after.
He own skin sings out, cries out as the newest seal shatters. She can already taste the metal on her tongue. She craves the pieces, and whether it’s for protection, for some righteous purpose or because it tastes like power on her tongue, she can’t quite say.
This time it’s the same, but not the same. This time the two stallions are struck into stillness. And they run. This turns her stomach more than anything else - how terrible a creature must exist to cause fear in the others?
She wishes for one moment they’d come back. Better the devil you know, after all,
They leave in their wake a shred of laughter, the echo of a crackling bellow. They leave in their wake their sickened monsters, their hideous creatures that gibber and growl and drip frothy saliva at her heels.
A flash, green this time, and she thinks of aliens, of otherworldly things.
(What else can it - can they - be, really?)
Another name, breathed sickly on the wind, seemingly woven into the very air of the place.
Famine, it says, and it takes her a moment to place the word, it's meaning.
It means death as much as any of the other beasts, but it means it in a slower, way, crueler. A slow taking of things, a belly hollowed, bones jutting through skin sharp enough to cut.
She waits for him to come, but he does not. He waits, insidious and easy, like he has all the time in the world.
(The darkness is like a song.)
Though her ribs ache - most of her aches - she makes her way towards him. She has no real plan, only the knowledge that this is what she must do.
She wears her own seals, in a way - skin lost to Conquest, bones broken to War.
So maybe she’s the sacrificial lamb and maybe she’s a hero, maybe she's nothing and maybe she’s everything -- she goes forward all the same.
(The world flickers and for a moment she wonders if she’s dying.)
She grows closer and inside her grows a new ache, a new persistent hunger. She’s known hunger before, has forgotten to eat for days until her stomach’s gone sour with acid, but this is something else.
Closer, and it feels like her body is trying to consume itself, like it’s a creature apart trying to eat its way out.
(The world flickers and when it comes back into view she realizes she is no longer bleeding, and it hurts a bit less to breathe.)
Through the reverie, through her stupid, single-minded notion (go to him), a screeching fills the air. An eagle - or something that was once an eagle - soars through the air, begins a descent toward her.
Why, it’s too heavy to fly! she finds herself thinking, because the eagle’s wings are metal, something corroded and rusty, making a terrible sound as the bird-thing pumps them.
But it lives in an impossible world amongst impossible monsters, so the illogic of it does not matter to the creature.
It screeches again, and she realizes it is coming for her. She is struck dumb for a moment, still focused on her aching stomach, and it gets close -- too close - before she reacts, lunges backward. Its rusted talons scrape across her cheekbone, opening a new gash there.
The eagle does not adjust in time, instead crashes to the ground. It breaks apart, mechanical, the nuts and bolts of its odd wings scattering across the scorched earth. One rolls to her hoof and she stares at it in a kind of dumb wonder.
She walks on. She walks on because it’s all she can do. All she knows to do.
The blood on her cheek feels almost like tears.
She’s vaguely aware of the others. The girl she had tried to save is still alive. There are others. Some good, some terrible, some so fundamentally broken that they’d give themselves to these beasts for a whit of power.
(Fool. The power is in the seals.)
The world flickers.
She has an odd, disquieting sensation to being pushed. She knows, vaguely, that it must be him - Famine - trying to nudge his way into the world.
And oh, what horrors would be bring?
Her stomach roils, emptier than it’s ever been. She looks for grass, but there is nothing, the few blades she pulls up turning to dust in her mouth.
“If you help me,” says a voice, and oh, he sounds like something wretched, a growling stomach, a well run dry, “I could let you take your meal.”
(The darkness is like a song.)
She looks out and he comes into view, flanked by Conquest and War.
They fear him, she realizes dully, as the world flickers again.
She considers it, for a moment. God help her, she considers it. Hunger is a persistent thing, a most basic instinct that cries out to be met.
She opens her mouth to speak
(to say yes)
but before any words come out she lunges her opened jaws to her own flesh, tears a piece from her shoulder, swallows. It tastes bitter, but it does not turn to dust.
The hunger is still a scream in her belly, but with her own blood on her lips, she feels a moment of relief, and a moment is all she needs.
Because she can think in the moment, and with her new clarity she can glance around with wide eyes, see what hunger had not allowed her to see before.
A piece of the seal, glinting near Famine’s hooves.
She lunges for it, tries to be quick even though her body is weakened - by the fighting, by the hunger, by this queer new life wrought upon her.
To them, it’s as if she’s moving through molasses.
But her mouth finds the seal, and it turns to liquid inside her, a new strength, a new power.
Famine screams in fury, and War and Conquest scream with him, a hellish chorus of monsters.
“You can’t,” she tells Famine, even though her voice is weak, even though she has tasted her own flesh for a moment of relief.
“You can’t,” she says again, and the defiance is its own chorus - she joins the others, the ones who resist them, who say no and you won’t win and not our home.
The world keeps flickering, faster now, and it’s all she can do to hold on
hickory
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I apologize for all typos/errors, even with a Bluetooth keyboard my phone is not the ideal vessel.
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