12-28-2017, 02:48 PM
The tendrils of nightfall drape around him like a cloak, hugging tightly to every crevice and hollow slope of his muscled body, melting into the black points of his legs and the thickness of his mane and tail. He stands at the mouth of the cavern opening, a listless reminder of the horrors he had befallen in a similar catacomb, now forced to relive the nightmare day in and day out - the darkness of the cave once called and crooned to him, but now their voices are unfamiliar and icy against his flesh where they had once been inviting, now soaked with demons’ moans and blood-curdling screams that ravage his eardrums. He had come out unscathed from the tomb within the mountain, with nary a scratch on his blue mottled hide, but the wounds that fester within him are not of the physical sort - darkness, once his ally, is now his undoing and now haunts him to the very core, a terror most inescapable. The blue roan stallion peers out into the moonlit forest, the vines that once draped the cave’s mouth now growing brittle and dry with autumn’s chill, crisp and gritting together in the icy howl of the wind. Somewhere in the listless blackness that opens up into nothingness behind him, there are tunnels and caverns that he knows like the back of his hands, despite the utter blindness he takes on within its depths. He and his companion have yet to explore them all, and before the mountain, he had been eager to see where each tunnel took him. One, they have found, leads to the torrent river that rushes through all of Beqanna. But now he is reverent and hesitant to explore them once more, plagued with visions of darkness and blood and demons waiting within the damp darkness. He can feel a fingerlike stroke on his spine, cold and malicious in the way it draws across his flesh. It is not real, he tells himself - his mantra for when the hallucinations feel like reality. It is not real, he thinks again, as he feels the bated breath of putrid breath on his face, closing his eyes tightly so that the vision of elongated teeth and open jaws will fade away, but it does not - it never does. Even with the cold autumn’s air blowing through the cave, the stallion is damp with sweat and anxiety, his heart rate pulsating as it quickens beneath his skin, the throb of his jugular nearly visible as his pulse pounds incessantly. He remembers the pain in his side just like it was yesterday as the demons dug into his chest cavity, intent with putting his heart within their jowls and swallowing it whole. The memory causes the place on his ribcage where they had dug into him throb wildly, and his breath catches in his throat as the white-hot intensity of his once-cleaved chest pains him once more - it’s not real. Oh, but it is. once the king of beasts but now they feast on thoughts beneath his vacant crown. |
@[Nikoline]