10-01-2020, 12:39 PM
"Snooth." She's talking to herself, rubbing her nose against the smooth, sun-warmed, skin of... well, she does not know what the thing is, its shape is vast, it goes forever, like a fountain of wall erupting out of the sandy ground, and the shade it casts stretches hungrily for the sea. There is something familiar to it, something like the fish she has seen occasionally, stranded and stinking on the sands (and even she has thought better than to wonder about their taste, and so she struggles to put the name and shape to the thing in front of her) but it does not share their putrid smell. She presses her hungry tongue to it and it tastes like blood; hard, smooth, still hot, gushing from the island at a glacial pace, and something like worry clenches her heart. Her home is bleeding and no-one has noticed but the little white-eared mare. She presses herself against the iron of its blood, as though to seal the wound with her body, but only causes deep furrows in the sand with her hooves.
Tears burn her yellow eyes and darken her red-gold cheeks, springing out of the impotence of her attempts, out of panic, out of a strange sense of the unfairness of things that doesn't quite touch on anger because Crackjaw never wholly remembers things well enough to be angry. Instead, she sobs quietly, bruising her own skin against the chipped sides of the orca statue she has found and cannot understand, and wonders where are the others, the man with the stars on his hide, and the blurred, vague shapes of those others who live here, whose faces are lost, blurred and distorted and forgotten. She knows there are others, but cannot recall if she has ever seen them, ever meet them.
Has she? No, maybe she is wrong, maybe it is only Aedan with the sea salt flavoring his skin like tears and his soft voice, perhaps there is no-one else, and perhaps he has left, too. Maybe they've all gone because the island is dying and only she has stayed behind, foolish and forgotten, to stem the slow tide of its death, to be crushed and broken under unyielding oceans of heavy blood. She does not think of fleeing, the shining sea beckons but she does not know how to swim, and can only scrape sharply angled teeth against the orca's side, chipping away flakes of paint that cut her lips and tongue until she bleeds, too, and leaves thin smears of red across its cracked flanks.
Tears burn her yellow eyes and darken her red-gold cheeks, springing out of the impotence of her attempts, out of panic, out of a strange sense of the unfairness of things that doesn't quite touch on anger because Crackjaw never wholly remembers things well enough to be angry. Instead, she sobs quietly, bruising her own skin against the chipped sides of the orca statue she has found and cannot understand, and wonders where are the others, the man with the stars on his hide, and the blurred, vague shapes of those others who live here, whose faces are lost, blurred and distorted and forgotten. She knows there are others, but cannot recall if she has ever seen them, ever meet them.
Has she? No, maybe she is wrong, maybe it is only Aedan with the sea salt flavoring his skin like tears and his soft voice, perhaps there is no-one else, and perhaps he has left, too. Maybe they've all gone because the island is dying and only she has stayed behind, foolish and forgotten, to stem the slow tide of its death, to be crushed and broken under unyielding oceans of heavy blood. She does not think of fleeing, the shining sea beckons but she does not know how to swim, and can only scrape sharply angled teeth against the orca's side, chipping away flakes of paint that cut her lips and tongue until she bleeds, too, and leaves thin smears of red across its cracked flanks.
Crackjaw
@[Gale] yeah, I dunno what this is, please enjoy lol