i’ve been both a saint & a viper
Darkness swells like a storm, sweltering with warm breath against the mottled blue of his dull skin, pulsing and rife with life as it twists around him, prying fingers scraping sharply then embracing him like an old friend. His own breath is ragged and slow, desperate for open air but locked within a prison made of shadow and pitch. They rumble in the darkness, their shadows dancing across the dripping stalactites and damp stone, cackling and whispering and howling. He knows they are beings of his own mind - a broken mind, torn and tattered beyond repair - but it does not make it any more comforting or any less real to him. They are as real as the darkness, as the sound of hooves against stone and the smell of decaying flesh somewhere deep within the dark pit he calls home.
They are like a cloak as he pulls himself forward through the cavern, dragging him down with each shuddering step, clinging to his gaunt skin with their drooling mouths and warm, empty lips. They lick at his legs, making each step more difficult than the next, their ominous whispers pressing in delicately to his ears. Stay here, they say, with us, stay where you belong. But he longs for light - even that of the silvered moon - and the intimacy that comes with leaving his cavern, desperate for company despite the one he keeps far beneath the ground already.
His hooves make a hollow, deathly sound as they clack against smooth, damp stone, echoing loudly.
The crisp air at the mouth of the cave moans against the worn angles of his face and he gasps as if it is his very first breath. They still scramble through his legs and across his back, slithering like serpents against him, whispering and champing their jaws to pinch his skin. His bright blue eyes watch the soft waving of drying vines that veil his prison, the full moon beyond the opening peeking through the entanglement of tree branches. The fresh night air is not enough to shy the shadows away from him and if anything, they crawl more intimately within the moonlight, rattling and twisting like vipers. “Can you feel them?” He whispers, barely a breath on his dark lips, to no one in particular. Maybe to himself, maybe to them.
He is only met with the mournful howl of the night wind (you are alone, she is not here for you tonight) and the despicable sound of their bodies scraping against him, unintelligible whispers echoing the deep darkness of the cave mouth.
Balto
@[Sabra]