All soft and black it's time to grow - Ryatah/any

[sinew]

sinew.

Sinew has never truly been afraid.

Only in her dreams, and even Pollock cannot venture there to taste the essence of her fear.

So the carcass did not bother her - not that day in the forest not too terribly long ago.

She had been in the earliest stages of her pregnancy then, and now she is overdue and far too thick in the girth for her tastes. Something in that thickness could suggest twins or a large colt, but she - like all mothers, knows otherwise and she thinks back to that carcass and that day and the bones that gave her name for the foal in her belly.

It is not that she trails after him;

Their paths happen to cross, and always here - in the Forest, his once and forever domain.

(It is more his kingdom than that of Pangea, for all that no kings hold a thorny throne here.)

Hers’ is a swollen ambling gait that belies her pregnant state; a most ungracious waddle as the unkind bark of the trees brushes against her fat sides. She knows that he has come here to hunt, for these are his hunting grounds and all in it are his prey - except her, she bids his hand of fear but never falls beneath it, not truly.

(When you are a filly barely weaned off your mother’s teat and you end up inside out of Time with a thing o golden eyes, scales and smoke, in a lake at dusk where a black mare bathes like a shadowy treasure ferreted away, you come to fear nothing but your own dark dreams.)

The fat little mare pauses; she sniffs the air, can scent his dusty Pangean smell on the crispness of the breezes that go swooping and whooshing by her. The wind is wild in that wood, wild like her brood is and less so because they are more creepy than anything and she feels an answering writhe in her womb, a kick that stabs at her guts and ribs and makes her seize up in a sudden sharp pause. “Damn whelp!” she barks to herself, more gruff than angered.

It is the voice up ahead that makes her pause longer, there is something familiar about it from a long-ago conversation in passing, from that day of carcass and strange woodland cat-but-not. Her black eyes land on a patch of recognizable green as her head swings about, not realizing that they had been so close all this time - him, her, and him. Beyond the deceptively smooth emerald of his skin is the familiar palomino of Pollock. Intrigued, she ambles closer, not disguising her approach in the least as she crashes through the deadfall to join them.  

The green stallion’s questions catch her attention as she plants her fat self beside Pollock, ever mindful of that one beautiful broken wing that drags horribly in the dust. A glance at it and she can see that it is caught full of branch and burr, ignored as usual and a sly grin pulls at her lips as her eyes return back to the green one and his odd slit-pupiled stare. “So eager,” she remarks casually, as he blunders on about how Pollock has done this or that - killed someone, she supposes, because that is something that Pollock does - kills or terrifies, or terrifies them to death, whatever suits him for the moment.

(Sinew has never heard his stories, but she’d like to now.)

the only promises that ever make sense