Crevan
We forget all the names that we used to know
Everything is different now.
Slumber had slipped from black unconsciousness to troubled dreams rather quickly for the growing colt, twisting in upon themselves and re-shaping time and time again the feel of slick blood, (was it his or someone else’s?) the sharp acidity of stomach bile, and the nameless, white-hot fear of death until, at last, he sprang into life once more with the shock of his dark eyes ripping open to pale unoffending sunlight.
There, prostrate on the muddied earth, Crevan had gasped in expectancy of pain only to find that none accompanied the action of rousing to consciousness. “Shock, you’re just in shock.” He tells himself while two, then three steady gulps of air fill his healthy lungs and ballon his sides outward. But the agony he’s so certain of never comes and with a more pleasant sort of revelation he drags a heavy, completely perfect, wolf-shaped body up in order to stand. “Jesus, god almighty…” The beastly creature mutters, turning a thickly furred skull from side-to-side while he appraises his ivory coat.
Neither hair nor hide is out of place.
Crevan, standing alone and rather stupidly in the heart of the great Meadow furrows a tan browline and tries, without much success, to puzzle out reality. The browning grass beneath his paws seems real and harmless enough but that anchor of normality can’t seem to quell the sharp jerk of his ears and the sudden tenseness that turns every muscle bunched beneath his skin to stone as a rustle nearby startles him. Hushed and poised he lowers himself, eyes upraised, to watch as a lonely doe perks from beneath her grassy cover to bound airily into the woodland.
No threat, then. No shadows and night here, no creatures that lay in wait. Just deer and, with the backwards turn of his head, other horses who’ve come to enjoy another listless graze. “Did I dream it?” He murmurs aloud, nearly unaware that he’s shifting into a horse until the shade of his nightlock mane tumbles over matching eyes. “Or am I dead?” He hums, feeling out of his body, out of this place and above the world itself.
Then our skin gets thicker, living out in the snow
@[Ledger]