08-06-2016, 11:34 PM
An odd sensation crawls down his throat, like suffocation - like a lack of air, it claws at his lungs and gut until he shakes the idea of it right out of his head. His horns clack against the branches, still tangle-touching as he blinks away the blight of emotion that grows dark and horrid on his heart. Or blinks away as much of it as he can, because it remains, a small fetid stain that spreads through him until his loathing for the meadow sits fully and heavy inside him, almost as if it is another self that crowds his skin, pushing at the edges and emerging in the raw shape of a shadow thrown large against the dusky snow.
It is a battle he that he loses to pure apathy as the snow banks itself against his knees, settles deep and hard around him. He does not feel the cold, even though it is ever warm in his canyon tucked away secretly in a corner of the badlands. Nor does he spare a single thought towards the trio of mares that occupy it - they tolerate him as much as he does them, and it is through mutual toleration one another that they are able to coexist in such balmy splendor at the edge of the desert now thrust under layers of water and angry magic. The goings-on around him have not been missed but he spares little thought towards them; the swell of night is too snowy and quiet to do little but numb him, freezing out bit by bit, all the time they shared there as he courted her and she swore her love to him.
Lies, his black heart murmurs to him. All lies, and he’d love to cut the tongue right out of her queenly pink mouth if he could. He can still hear the first I love you in the wind as it tumbles around him until he shakes his head again, sending snow flying and the branches clattering against his horns noisily, and thereby drawing undue attention to himself in the form of a small red mare that has an odd delicacy to her and a papery whisper to her wings, the latter of which caught his attention as much as his horns catch hers’. His nerves feel raw as she comes close, smiles and talks and finally meets his eyes with her own that seem to have gone dreamy and soft in a way that he is unfamiliar with. He has never seen a look quite like that and he almost thinks her daft, feeling pity claw at his throat.
There is a certain fragility to her that ought to have aroused some instinct in him to shelter her, but he seems rather bereft of it at the moment and only stares back at the mare, not quite sure why she looks so out of place amidst the snow. She has a delicate stiffness to her that is much more refined than his own, almost like she was made of something other than flesh and blood… he doesn’t realize that he has stretched out his nose and come so close as to almost brushing it against her own, until he snorts himself back to the moment at hand and pulls his head back to where the branches hug his horns tight and noisily to themselves.
He almost tells her that she is intruding, because that would be an almost easy end to a conversation hardly begun. Mandan is cut to the quick by her honest admittance of having never seen anyone like him and he’s not sure what she means by that… the horns maybe, as it dawns on him slowly and he lowers his head a fraction to where she could better study the addax horns without the addition of the branches catching up in the two hard spires of horn. “Well Adaline, I don’t suppose I’ve seen anything quite like you either.” he admits, and not because of the wings that droop by her sides, tattered and papery and so like the leaves in autumn, red and dry and ruined. It is the odd sheen to her skin that makes him faintly curious of her, of what she is, and if she is like that on the inside too; he doesn’t know it is glass but finds his mouth opening and shutting on that itch to feel along her ribs and spine, to poke and prod until he discovers exactly what it is that she is made of.
Mandan wants to know just what the oddness is that sets her apart from all the rest; that makes him more tolerant of her in the dark, as if that made all the difference, because she was a small red candle giving off heat and light in the snowy dusk that beckoned to him from within the shadows that keep threatening to steal back her flicker of dreamy daft life that for once, stirs him from his thoughts of a love betrayed.