burnt offerings; any

[sinew]

The dark beckons; reminds her of him and she half expects his eyes to appear out of the dark, his flesh to materialize from shadow and smoke. Sometimes she dreams of him, but the dreams never stay long enough for her to remember much about them except that he is in them and that is enough for her - these phantasmal touches in dreams, and the way his eyes gleam like gold or poison in a cup made from a skull, ancient and gruesome. She cannot help the way she sighs when she thinks of him, the corners of her lips sag dreamily until she snaps awake and flings the fragments of sleep from her face with a toss of her head that contains shreds of barely contained violence. It brims in her, bubbles and seethes at times until she doesn’t know what to do with the way she feels. These are the times when she throws caution to the wind and launches herself headstrong into the face of danger, fearless and thrumming with a sense that she flirts with the end and she has never felt so alive than in those moments of a dance with death. The merest brush with it is enough to make her heart spin and sing in her and she loves it, oh how she loves it! Sinew is foolishly brave and bravely foolish - a paradox unto herself as she sniffs and snorts at the earth, bits of dirt and grass stick to her muzzle until she rubs it against a knee and the detritus sloughs off like an old dead skin that never really belonged to her. She figures she might as well do something to dispel the boredom that creeps in the dark’s stead, threatening her with an idleness that might just be her undoing and so, what else is there to do then court their favor and fling herself into the grand folly of something she has not given much thought to - herd or kingdom? Both seem completely nonsensical to her for she has ever been beset by bum-like tendencies that keep her tethered in their own way but create just the right amount of illusionary freedom to satisfy her odd little heart. To the field she goes, on feet light and quick, medicine-capped like her mother and there the similarities end for Sinew is more bright chestnut and white in her pretty overo pattern than Scalped ever was. Sinew knows they will not know her for anything other than a fresh face not wholly scrubbed free of its youth but there is no innocence in her look, only haunted things, and dark knowing eyes that have seen too much even before she was conceived - Sinew was her very namesake, old and timeless, and she feels the immortality like a sluggish worm threading its way through her insides, it feeds on the few remaining kernels of her mortality, strangling them useless and dead until she knows that in a year or so, she will remain forever this way - bold, impetuous, and somehow, pretty. For now, she is picking her way carefully amongst them, sparing a few them a bold black look but most quail beneath the directness of her gaze and she swings her head away from them, to behold the field in all its glorified squalor.