10-16-2019, 06:45 PM
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane; Time has become both everything and nothing, to him. It is everything because he is drowning in the number of years he’s spent alive (with a respite between them, but ah, he’d returned, and thought it a curse rather than a blessing). They are chains at the ankles, anchors, and sometimes he thinks it’s a miracle he can move at all beneath such weight. Yet – Yet it is nothing because for all the years (the decades – longer?) he carries, he no longer shows it. His mane has not gone gray, his muscles have not atrophied, he looks young, almost, primed. He feels anything but, of course, he feels old and dead and hurt, savaged by the world about him. But his body doesn’t betray it, not at first, one would have to stare deep into his godforsaken orange eyes, would have to be wise to what lurks there, all those heartbreaks and the uglier things, too, the sins he longs to forget, the sins that, like the years, weigh upon him and keep him heavy. Yet it is nothing. A black stallion moves through the meadow, unsure of his purpose here, only knowing that his weary hooves have brought him to this damnable familiar place, along paths he knows but have changed, in the time he has been away. And sure, his stride his slow, and if you look too long upon him perhaps a sense of wrongness scratches at the back of the mind, but mostly, he is just a sleek young thing, nothing remarkable about him save for those orange eyes, the ones that almost glow, like jack-o’-lanterns. Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain. |