Whose afraid of the big bad wolf? [Any]

[Reuen]

Is it just me, Or do you wonder if we're put here just to see, There's ravens in the backdrop. Feathers broad and like inky tendrils of darkness against the night stygian. I watch them, hollow eyes finding some sort of memory of wings, how they broaden, how they shift like ink against the world. I then notice the shadow shifts and hoofbeats pound from the darkness beyond the copse of trees. My mind twists, it turns, full of an empty pallor. I do not move, I stay as still as a corpse, as still as I have ever known. Even the bodies that had ramshackle the ground before, before this, had twitched with nerves still wrought with pain. I didn't shift whatsoever. Only to run, to run as far away and as fast as I could. The burden still twinges my legs, my muscles, even after seasons of change. The painted mare appears, all debonair, all real. I tilt my head, fully to the side; mimicking the birds that I have watched in the shadows briefly before. Tilting to the right, and then fully to the left. My eyes find her, like a splash of colour against the night. Red eyes. the painted lady states and I pull my gaze from her to the pallid man. His ghost tinged skin ripples in the slither of moonlight; but it's those eyes that burn into my like flame. Fire. It destroys, it turns everything to ash. As his gaze roams me, he seems to have changed his course, finding my delicate state almost to his liking. 'Vultures pick at white bone. Strip tender flesh. Right down to the pulsing core.'. The words slip, jumbled like pieces of a puzzle. Haunting and eerie. I watch the painted mare, Straia. The name bounces around from the blank canvases in my head, and there I depict her -- painting her a picture of raven feathers and ivory and russet. She looks like the cavernous birds, fondling their prey before they swoop down and lure them in. I am tentative in my gaze, dropping it now and again. 'Straia. Chamber. Chamber of... secrets.' My tongue feels like rock, hard and foreign in my mouth as they taste the bittersweet tone on my tongue. I tilt my head back to study the cremello. I feel him grow ever closer, and as he trails my wounds with his eyes, it triggers something. Vultures pick at the bones, rip and tear, rip and tear. The sound of swallowing flesh chills me to the very deepest core. I lay low, my chocolate body dripping in blood; someone else's as well as mine. He protects me, his vast body thrown over mine, but his weight becomes dead, heavy and I heave him off when the commotion dies off. Death. It is stale, it taints the air with a decay and a bittersweet twang. Someone rips me from my feet then, I stumble and he tells me to run. To run and never return. I ran, I ran all the way, until blood pulsed my nostrils, my lungs turned to lead. It led me to the Gates, it found me a solace, a sanctuary. And now, now I'm here and reliving the twitches of memory at the Ghost's gentle touch. Just on the horizon beyond his fiery eyes, I see the flames flicker, the fire that raged my home, my family. I had it once, I'm sure of that. Everyone had a family, a home once. The memories die off and it leaves me as open as a book, my hollow eyes brimming with something wet, something tacky. They slip down my cheeks, like rich chocolate melting against my skin. 'Ghost. Ghosts haunt, they cause pain.' I stop, dropping my muzzle low, touching the dirt on the ground before bringing it back up so that my eye connect with his red ones. 'Fun... Fun. Perhaps, perhaps the bones, the muscles taste as nice as tender grass.' The smile that haunts my lips twists and turns, mimicking some psychotic grin of power, of bloodlust. I watch everything, I am everything, like a morphing mouldable piece of clay. I change like the backdrop, but my eyes, they are a constant blankness, as if there is nothing inside, only secrets, secrets I too long to find. 'Fun. What is fun?' How much heartache we can take, Without hanging from the tallest tree? - resident of the gates -